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744 | How to conjugate "fhtagn" in R'lyehian?
The accepted translation of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu fhtagn" seems to be "Cthulhu dreams".
How would one conjugate "fhtagn" to get the word derivations "dream", "dreamer", "dreaming".
This answer had a helpful link for translations, but not much in the way of deriving conjugates.
fyi, not all derivations are conjugations; suggest you look up the latter word.
Conjugate seemed to be the closest descriptive word I could find to describe this word derivation when I posted this. If there's a more accurate word, please share.
Lovecraft probably didn't think about grammar, and we certainly don't have enough material to reconstruct one. Could also be like Sindarin, where Tolkien wrote much, but never released any specification of the language. Quote from the threat you linked: "To my knowledge, we only have the transcription in the Latin alphabet" (comment from Sparksbet).
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739 | Adding entire musical concepts to expand vocabulary
I want my language, Syn, to be as precise, efficient, unambiguous, and aesthetic as humanely possible. To do that, I think even the texture, dynamics, rhythm, and the likes should be accounted for.
As far as I know, only Mandarin incorporates changes in intonation corresponding with a different meaning of the same spoken word, but even that can be hard to notice for non-speakers.
Are there any other languages that incorporte musical concepts?
If there are, how did people manage to use those concepts?
If there are none yet, will such a language possess an added difficulty when speaking it?
I imagine that the native speakers of Syn would be naturally adept in tone recognition, and every conversation would seem like an a capella get-together.
What you describe Mandarin as is called a tonal language. Tonality is pretty common in natural languages. Note that you also use intonation in English in a more restricted manner (e.g. "You can." vs. "You can?")
Note that some people would consider that ambiguity is aesthetic.
Wikipedia has a list of tonal languages
There is a precedent for the use of a musical tone scale in constructed languages: Solresol, a philosophical language constructed in the 19th century. Some natural languages also have a whistled mode, most notably El Silbo and Pirahã.
I am not aware of a language—neither natural nor constructed—that incorporates the concept of rhythm or other musical concepts.
The Yllurian Spell Singing Language incorporates as part of its magical effect the use of ordinary lexicon & grammar with musical pitch & rhythm.
As a ritual language, for any given spell to be effective, not only must the text be written and sung, but the tones & rhythms must be notated as well. The text may be sung or the notes may be played upon a flute constructed to conform to the particular mode of the music.
You can read a little about the Spell Singing Language here.
Where can I find sample scripts of Yllurian?
@Kyle Zabala --- Thanks for asking! Link to article added.
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721 | What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?
This question is different than the previous one titled “Which features make a language easier to learn?” in that I'm not interested in making it easy for L1 learners. For them learning the language spoken by their society is an inevitability.
Specifically, I'm interested in making a language that is objectively as easy to learn as possible for people learning it as a second language. And these features should help people regardless of what language they speak natively.
It seems intuitive that there would exist features that would help to create that.
For example, take French or German and remove the genders. This seems like it should make the languages easier to learn without losing any communicative power. Another example would be phonology. If English were to remove the 'th' sound it would be easier for speakers of other languages to learn.
I also realize that it may be the case that there just isn’t enough research on this topic to know definitively what features are best for this.
You should take a look at the very minimal Toki Pona. It basically makes everything simpler. 14 phonemes, about 120 root words, mostly CV syllables (for native Austronesian language speakers) and an extremely small grammar (Wikipedia gives 10 syntax rules). All these features make for easier learning, but certain information must often be inferred from context.
Look at sen:esepera language - it tries to take the ease of learning Esperanto vocabulary and eliminating those features that are not universal among synthetic languages.
You definitely lose some communicative power by removing gender from French or German, it is used, e.g., to disambiguate coreference.
It depends very much who your target audience is.
It is easier to learn languages that are similar to your own; as a German speaker, learning English is not that hard, apart from the grammatical features (aspect, for example) that don't really have a German equivalent. It's mainly a matter of learning the huge vocabulary with all its not-quite-but-almost synonyms.
Same with Esperanto. Grammar is easy, and most of the vocab is not too hard either. Here it's the particles which are the tricky bit.
I'm currently learning Dutch and Swedish, which are both similar to German, in some respects. No big deal. But both Arabic and Korean are a lot harder, and I gave up on Russian. These languages are very different from German, and thus harder for me to learn (the different alphabet is not the issue).
Klingon is hard for me to learn, because it has a different sentence structure (OVS, as opposed to SVO). If my native language had OVS as well, for example Apalaí or Hixkaryana, I think I would find Klingon much easier. Especially since Apalaí is also agglutinative, like Klingon.
There is a list of languages ordered by difficulty (from the Foreign Service Institute). The 'easy' languages are all Indo-European, and the hard ones are Asian/Semitic. You can imagine that the same list produced by a Chinese or Japanese institution would look very different.
Languages have no 'absolute' difficulty, but only relative. So to answer your question, you can make a language easier to learn for people if you make it more similar to their L1. Which, I guess, is the reason why there is no universal 'easy' language that we all speak...
Absolutely the answer I would have given (i.e. it depends on your L1). However, I didn't find French too difficult from English, and I've all but given up on German despite it being "closer" than French to English. I find Dutch, and Norwegian (after the initial shock) easy to learn. Norwegian grammar seems to be about 90% the same as English, although the vocabulary is very different. Dutch grammar is also similar to English and has many familiar words. German is full of rules that simply don't exist in English or have anything similar (e.g. a lot of grammatically distinct versions of "the").
@CJDennis English lost most of its inflectional morphology, which German retained. I guess it also depends on which elements of your L1 you find easy. When I did Swedish and Dutch at the same time, I found they were actually too similar and I would confuse them, so I did some Dutch first and then revisited Swedish, which now works much better.
Sometimes similarity is different from genetic closeness. For example, it's said that learning Latin is easier for German speakers than for speakers of the more related Romance languages, because German and Latin have declension and Romance languages lost it long ago.
Measuring Easiness
I agree with Oliver that we measure language difficulty based on how hard it is to learn from a given native language. However, I still believe that we can come up with language features that make a language easy to learn in general. To measure this, you would want to take the number of hours it takes to achieve a certain level of proficiency in a target language from 50 source languages (the languages with the most speakers). After this come up with an average by weighting the numbers based on number of speakers. A language with an average of 456 hours would be easier to learn for the average person than a language with an average of 678 hours. This is of course not a method of deriving 'absolute' difficulty but it's good enough for what I want. Now, actually running this experiment would take a lot of time but for now it's good as a thought experiment to figure out what the goal is.
Phonology
Trying to get the sounds right in a new language can be very time consuming. To counteract this an easy language should use phonemes that are common amongst the world's most spoken languages. As Richard noted in the comments the language Toki Pona has a very simple phonology that would be perfect for this. Toki Pona has nine consonants p, t, k, s, m, n, l, j, w and five vowels a, e, i, o, u. Not only are these very common phonemes but there is also the added benefit that there are no voiced/voiceless pairs. The reason this is useful is because it helps people whose language contains only one of the voiced or voiceless forms of a consonant. As an example, Arabic has no 'p' sound and therefore when they see the world 'pala' in a theoretical easy language they might pronounce it as 'bala'. Since there is no 'b' sound people will recognize that they are saying 'pala'.
Vocabulary
Having a vocabulary that everyone would recognize would be useful but it's unfortunately not possible. The best attempts at creating such a vocabulary would only be useful for around 15 percent of the world's population. Add to this the fact that phonology is more important, and using the simplified phonology, you would not even be able to mimic a lot of the vocabulary from a natural language. However, there are still some things that would help make a language's vocabulary easier to learn: avoiding homonyms, making common words short, constructing words to be easy to pronounce (ex. avoiding complex consonant clusters).
Writing System
It has been proven that phonetic writing systems are easier to learn than logographic systems. Between phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, abjad) it's less clear what the easier to learn system is. However, it doesn't really matter due to the overwhelming adoption of the Latin script world wide (70% of the world's population use it). Even in places where the native language does not use the Latin script people will still have significant exposure to it. Because of this an easy to learn language should use the Latin script. The words should also be completely phonetic in their spelling. This allows learners to read, pronounce, and spell any word without having to memorize a bunch of spelling rules and exceptions.
Regularity
This one is self explanatory. A language that has regular grammar and no exceptions to its grammar rules is easier to learn. This should apply to all forms of grammar (inflections, word order, usages). As an example, if English were to always use -ed to make verbs past tense it would be easier to learn (swimmed, eated, falled).
Lack of Unnecessary Features
Just as biological evolution has left human bodies with a large amount of inefficiencies, language evolution has left natural languages with a large amount of inefficiencies. It would take a long time to go through these as there are many, so I'll just use the gender example from the question. As jknappen said in the comments grammatical genders do have a small amount of communicative power in that they can, on occasion, avoid ambiguity of two things. However, this only happens when there are two things potentially being referred to, when it's not clear based on context which thing is being referred to, and when the two things are different genders. Example from Wikipedia: "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain" vs "ein Blumenbeet im Garten, das ich pflege". This is very rare and not useful enough to merit spending a significant amount of time learning genders.
I would add lack of ambiguity. What I find most confusing about national languages is how the same sequence of sounds can have different meanings - usually because a word has several seemingly unrelated definitions, but sometimes because the word boundaries are unclear (one lame example: is "expertsexchange" two words or three?) The more definitions, the harder it gets to understand (e.g. I studied Spanish for years and never really got used to a very common word: "se")
I agree with everything Oliver Mason said.
EDIT: After some more thought...for easiness that is only easy when in the presence of a first language, the question has the answer, which is: languages most similar to your first language. Otherwise, an easy language is an easy language.
I'd add that there is something to be said for:
Small languages, which have most content word classes are closed. In English, only function word classes, like prepositions are closed. When people are working from a small known set of words (or morphemes), sometime the lexemes they create are transparent and their meaning can be guessed. This reduces the burden of memorizing 7000-12000 words (or lexemes-- depending on the linguist, word count accounting can vary).
Smallness also applies to grammar- the fewer rules, the easier to learn, albeit at a cost of expressiveness.
Examples would be toki pona and Esperanto before the community began bulk importing of loan words from French, et al.
Creole-like.
Creole languages tend to have certain predictable features that in part are explainable because they were spoken by communities that can't be bothered to learn the complex parts of the six languages in the community. Languages like this are more likely to be SVO, analytic, simplified and smaller, etc.
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810 | How would one describe different tones on paper?
In my new language, I use tones, such as those in Mandarin and Cantonese, to diversify my words. When I try to make a dictionary, I do not know how to describe these tones. I have tried using parts different English words to describe what a tone sounds like, but that is not very efficient. Is there a simpler way to describe these tones?
Do you mean in terms of notation? Or describing your conlang's inventory of tones? Or describing what tone is itself?
@curiousdannii I mean the sound of the tones
How many tones?
@ChristopheStrobbe does it matter?
I think it is relevant to the representation of tones in writing, i.e. whether you can represent them with existing diacritics or (of you go overboard on tones) you need to use a different mechanism. (And I am no fan of the tone letters used in Gwoyeu Romatzyh.)
Probably around 5 or 6 maybe?
Does this help? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Phonetic_notation
I think vowel + shift in tone is key. If you'd just have different tones (as in notes) for vowels, that would conflict with expressions of pain, surprise, etc. In Asian Philology, when we talk about "tones", we actually mean a change in pitch for a vowel. Chinese has 4: Same, Up, Down and Down+Up. Thai for example has more.
Here's a grid of the most used tonal notation systems for Chinese:
The most common in use today is Pinyin
You can use standard musical notation to describe the tones of your conlang. Level tones are just represented by different notes, and tonal glides can be represented by groups of notes joined with a slur. The notes can also hint the duration of a syllable.
An alternative to that are Tone Letters introduced by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao providing a nice visual cue to tone levels and contour tones.
These means are for the explanation of the tones to the aspiring learner of your conlang, their representation in a writing system is another thing worth a separate question.
And you can of course notate tone in IPA.
Musical notation for languages is problematic, because while you could certainly map e.g. “high tone” (a phonemic concept) to a certain note purely for writing purposes, but this would entirely obfuscate the reality wherein intonation, stress etc change the actual realization of tone.
Similarly, if you were to write out the actual realizations, you’d only get a crude approximation. At that point, it would be better to just write a continuous line over your text indicating the pitch relative to some baseline.
Vietnamese is a tonal language that is written with a Latin character set, using accents and other "punctuation" to indicate the tones. Take a look at it because at the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnamese alphabet for some ideas about how it is implemented.
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1244 | How many literatures?
I believe or assume that Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, and Klingon each have at least a few translations of important literature such as the Bible or Hamlet. What other constructed languages have been used for extended writing, either original or translated, as opposed to sample texts and the like?
To put it another way (which is not quite synonymous but close enough), what is the longest single composition in – for example – Bolak, Solresol, Toki Pona?
I don't have an answer for you, but I expect it will be longer than you expect. I remember my astonishment at seeing Alice in Wonderland in Lojban
I'm not really certain this question can be answered. What do you mean by "extended writing" -- how much is enough? Do we have collections or even indexes of texts by invented language?
@elemtilas The answer to your second question would be most of an answer to mine!
The Bibliography of Planned Languages (excluding Esperanto) is a starting point, if one a couple decades out of date. Besides the languages you mention, it lists Basic English as having a Bible translation and Plato's Republic. There's no other mentions of serious texts, though some of the languages you mention seem to be missing works that were published in those languages.
Following some of the links, http://www.glosa.org/en/index_materia.html has some text in Glosa, include what seems to be full translations of Luke and Acts.
Bolak and Solresol seem never to have gotten past the basic grammar and dictionary.
The Toki Pona site offers the Wizard of Oz for sale, which seems to be the largest work in that language.
Latino sine flexione famously had the final edition of Formulario mathematico published exclusively in the language.
This answer is about as good as I'm likely to get, thanks.
For Toki Pona in specific, there's tons of literature, both original and translated. The annual writing competition utala musi produces many original works. The current longest work is kapesi Pake's 2024 novella nasin Lanpan, with a word count of 66,372.
Here is a list of toki pona literary works by length (of which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only eighteenth!). You can see many other examples at this page about literature, and at "Where is Toki Pona used?" on lipu pi sona pona.
Kotava has a remarkable translation activity and many classic authors are translated into this language. There is a page with a list of translations (unfortunately, this page seems to be available in French only). You can click on the title of the work to see original and translation.
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510 | What has the impact of Star Trek: Discovery been on the development of Klingon?
Has Klingon changed significantly since it has started being used for Star Trek: Discovery? Has the vocabulary grown significantly? Has there been novel grammar revealed? To what extent is the language still developing under Marc Okrand's guidance to meet the demands of the script, and how much leeway does Robyn "Qov" Stewart have in coming up with Klingon translations for the script?
The language still has Okrand's guidance, and he trusts Robyn to do it correctly.
From IndieWire:
Before Stewart initially took the “Discovery” job, she did check in with Okrand himself to make sure he approved. “He said, ‘You know what? I’m really glad you’re doing this for two reasons: One is so I don’t have to do it.’ Because just for a movie, it’s a lot of work, and the series goes on,” Stewart said.
But Okrand then added that he knew “the language is in good hands.” Said Stewart, “It was a huge ego boost for me — his confidence that I’ll do it correctly."
And even though Robyn Steward has Okrand's approval, every change has to get his stamp of approval before officially being added to the language.
TrekMovie tells us:
As was noted in the video, Okrand isn’t working on Star Trek: Discovery, as the translating for the show is being handled by Klingon expert Robyn Stewart. However, Okrand is still the only person who can introduce new words into the Klingon language, which is maintained by the Klingon Language Institute. As he does at each annual conference of the KLI (called the qep’a’), Okrand introduced a number of new Klingon words in the summer of 2017. You can see the full list at KLI.org (words noted as “qep’a’ 24” were announced this year).
So to address each question:
Has Klingon changed significantly since it has started being used for Star Trek: Discovery?
Nope - the people working on it are hardcore Klingon speakers, doing their utmost to keep everything accurate.
Has the vocabulary grown significantly?
Yes, it's grown - you can see exactly which words were added recently in the above link.
Has there been novel grammar revealed?
As far as I am aware, and from what Google turns up, no. The grammar is still the same as it was - just words are being added.
To what extent is the language still developing under Marc Okrand's guidance to meet the demands of the script, and how much leeway does Robyn "Qov" Stewart have in coming up with Klingon translations for the script?
As mentioned in the above quote from TrekMovie, Okrand still has control over the language - while Steward has some wiggle room like any other translation to any other language, she has to work with the language, only adding words when absolutely necessary.
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1854 | Do I really need plural grammatical number when my conlang deals with existence and uniqueness?
I continued building my conlang, and it's time to deal with grammars of nouns. In my conlang, nouns are categorized into three: countable, measurable, and abstract. This question is about countable nouns.
As this conlang heavily takes concepts of mathematics, there are two things this conlang deals seriously with: existence and uniqueness. Those already give three grammatical numbers.
Null: Zero or more.
Existential: One or more.
Unique: Exactly one.
The "null" quantification poses the noun without specifying its number. The "existential" quantification poses that the noun exists, not necessarily singular or plural. The "unique" quantification has effect of specifying a single object; this doesn't mean there uniquely existed the object to specify from the start, and should not be confused with definite articles like "the".
The motivation of the "existential" quantification is like this: For example in mathematics, when we say "They share a vector", we really mean "There exists a vector they share". I thought it'd be good to have a separate quantification for what "a" really means here.
There is another quantification I want to introduce:
Optional: Zero or one.
This states that there is no guarantee that the noun exists, but it'd be unique if it does.
The main question is: Do I need a plural quantification? This doesn't seem to be much used in mathematics. When we say "They share vectors", we really mean "Their vectors coincide". It's not that there are two or more vectors they share, and in my conlang, I'd just say about them coinciding.
Furthermore, the "optional" quantification serves as the negation of the plural quantification, so I can negate it back. Though, I don't see a good English demonstration.
I'm contemplating: "You can share cars" vs "You can share a car". Are you asking if you need plural quantification in the optional case? It sounds like you need a quantifier that excludes plurality, maybe for talking about things that you either have or don't, but rarely have more than one of like a spouse, or a driver's licence, or social security number. I guess your language will be able to concisely convey the idea of having a heart, where it would be medically bad/complicated to have two hearts, but it's conceivable that you could live with no heart, with the aid of a machine.
No, you do not. Plenty of natural languages get along fine without a grammatical plural. On any situation where it actually matters, you can just use an explicit numeral.
Yeah, for one example, Japanese famously lacks plural forms in its grammar. There are some ways to indicate a plural, like giving a specific number, adding the equivalent of "some" or "a few", etc. However you don't often need to use such constructions in the language unless it is important to be clear that more than one is being referenced, or for emphasis. Plurality is often just implied by context. Leaving those out generally leaves you with a grammatical sentence with the same basic meaning, but which may not convey quite as much information.
Japanese has restricted plurals such as -たち, -ら, -ども as well as reduplication for certain native nouns. I wouldn't say Japanese lacks plural forms in general.
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1750 | How should I define the lexicographic order for my conlang?
Though I've had a tough time choosing the phonology and the orthography of my conlang, I think I've finally confirmed it: 12 consonants, 10 vowels, Cyrillic script.
The consonants are:
Пп for [p]
Тт for [t]
Цц for [t͜s]
Чч for [ʈ͡ʂ], or [t͜ɕ] when iotified
Кк for [k]
Ҁҁ (koppa) for [ʡ]
Фф for [f]
Ѳѳ (fita) for [θ]
Сс for [s]
Шш for [ʂ], or [ɕ] when iotified
Мм for [m]
Нн for [n]
The vowels are:
Аа for [a] / Яя for [ja]
Ээ for [e] / Ее for [je]
Ыы for [ɯ] / Ии for [i]
Оо for [ɔ] / Ёё for [jɔ]
Уу for [u] / Юю for [ju]
But how should the words of my conlang be ordered on a dictionary? It seems that the best solution is to follow the Russian lexicography, while inserting the missing letters owing to their Phoenician origins. That would give the lexicographical order of АЕЁИѲКМНОПСТУФҀЦЧШЫЭЮЯ. Or is there a better option?
(Sorry for bad tagging; there is no "lexicography" tag.)
People aren't especially consistent about this with natlangs; it tends to depend on the target audience. For example, Akkadian words are conventionally sorted by English alphabetical order, with Š and Ṣ inserted after S. This is convenient for English-speakers, who will see a letter that looks like an S, and find it in the S-esque section of the dictionary. Hebrew-speakers, who are used to separate letters for S, Š, and Ṣ, would probably prefer to put S (samekh) after N, Ṣ (tzade) after P, and Š (shin) after Q. But the majority of people consulting an Akkadian-to-English dictionary are probably not familiar with Hebrew alphabetizing conventions.
In-universe, the speakers of your conlang can get used to any lexicographic order. They tend to be pretty much arbitrary, after all, and children memorize them without issue. So I would think about out-of-universe convenience. Who is going to be consulting this dictionary? What ordering will they find most intuitive? The target audience is probably you more than anyone else (you're going to be adding to this dictionary, after all), so if referencing Phoenician alphabetical order works for you, I'd go with that.
I think your proposal sounds well-considered--especially if you want your computer to sort your vocabulary lists in alphabetical order rather than you having to do it all by hand.
If I were you, I'd (a) write your alphabet with each letter inserted into the cell of a single column table, (b) have the computer sort the items in the table, and (c) adopt the results of the sorting as alphabetical order.
For the Western alphabets (including Cyrillic), the lexicographic order is essentially arbitrary. If there was once a reason behind the original order of the Semitic alphabet, it is long forgotten and buried in the dust of time.
There are some scripts with a more rationalised lexicographic order, Indic scripts like Devanagari separate vowels from consonants and order the consonants by place of articulation. The conscript Tengwar by JRR Tolkien has adopted this approach. Also, the Universal Alphabet by Francis Lodwick followed this approach.
The decision is essentially yours: Reasons for some preference can be convenience of usage for the potential users of your conlang, æsthetic criteria like elegance of the sorting order or grouping similar shapes of the letters together, or linguistic criteria as in Devanagari.
dan04's answer gives several good options, but I will suggest some others, which are more likely if the letter was re-adopted after having fallen out-of-use. When a new letter is added to an existing alphabet, there seems to be a strong tendency to insert it at the end. This happened with the latin "Z" which was inserted at the end of the alphabet even though its Greek counterpart is towards the beginning of the alphabet. That would give you:
АЕЁИѲКМНОПСТУФЦЧШЫЭЮЯҀ
Another option is to put it with a letter that sounds similar, probably К:
АЕЁИѲКҀМНОПСТУФЦЧШЫЭЮЯ
Finally, you can put it with a letter that looks similar, like С (this is how the Latin letter G ended up coming after F).
АЕЁИѲКМНОПСҀТУФЦЧШЫЭЮЯ
I disagree with "this is how the Latin letter G ended up coming after F", I think the Latin letter G was inserted at the position of the then-abolished letter Z to keep the positional values of the other letter intact.
See also this question on [latin.se] and questions linked to it: https://latin.stackexchange.com/q/58/183
It's ultimately an arbitrary choice. But, I assume that you want a "naturalistic" order to make it look like your version of the Cyrillic alphabet evolved in parallel with Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, etc., I would make one change: Move Ҁ (Q) to between П (P) and C (S), to match its position in the Phonecian, archaic Greek (Ϙ), and Latin alphabets.
АЕЁИѲКМНОПҀСТУФЦЧШЫЭЮЯ
An alternative ordering can be obtained by treating your alphabet as a more direct descendant of the Phonecian and Greek alphabets, treating Ц and Ч as counterparts to Tsadi/San (between P and Q), and Ш as Shin/Sigma. This gives:
АЕЁИѲКМНОПЦЧҀСШТУФЫЭЮЯ
And then there's the lazy programmer's approach of just using the Unicode code point order:
ЁАЕИКМНОПСТУФЦЧШЫЭЮЯѲҀ
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1395 | How should my conlang enable arbitrarily large integers to be said?
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. It's named Leksah.
Leksah is heavily influenced by the programming language Haskell. As such, Leksah has only 3 parts of speech:
Literals, which usually correspond to nouns. These are always written titlecased. (Yep, like German!)
Functions, which usually correspond to verbs.
The particle "-el", which applies a function.
As such, Leksah has word order VSO.
Yet there is a special kind of literals: Numerals. There are infinite number of integers, and I cannot make every single new word for every integer.
Furthermore, it seems no natural languages can spell every integers. The maximum units are "vigintillion" for English, "무량대수"(無量大數) for (Sino-)Korean and so on.
That said, let me introduce some aspects of my world. The main residents of my world are angels (dubbed moderators in my world), and some of those whose "duties" are related to math (cryptologists in particular?) has obligations involving huge numbers. That's why my conlang must enable such numbers to be said.
So here's a sketch of how numerals would be dealt. Integers shall be written and said in decimal. Here's how digits are said:
0 = "Nad" (from NADAZERO)
1 = "Un" (from UNAONE)
2 = "Bis" (from BISSOTWO)
3 = "Ter" (from TERRATHREE)
4 = "Kar" (from KARTEFOUR)
5 = "Pan" (from PANTAFIVE)
6 = "Sox" (from SOXISIX)
7 = "Set" (from SETTESEVEN)
8 = "Ok" (from OKTOEIGHT)
9 = "Nov" (from NOVENINE)
Though these are literals, as an exception, they can be applied by "-el". In this context, it concatenates digits to make bigger numbers:
42 = "KarelBis"
108 = "UnelNadelOk"
65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"
Note that the spellings are camelcased.
Yet I think there are some disadvantages compared to natural languages:
This scheme wastes time when saying a power of 10. "10000" is spelled "UnelNadelNadelNadelNad".
This scheme is very prone for a listener to accidentally omit or duplicate a digit, especially when the same digit is repeated.
How should I modify this scheme to avoid such situations? Is there any conlang can say arbitrarily large integers?
"Is there any conlang can say arbitrarily large integers?" - not a conlang, but an constructed extension to the English convention allows this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers#Extensions_of_the_standard_dictionary_numbers
and to frame challenge your question, perhaps the moderators are mathematically perfect beings: they will never make mistakes when speaking a number; and unlike humans find no special significance in the powers of ten; that is to say they would find 4 294 967 296 (i.e 2^32) to be at least as interesting and important as 1 000 000 000, and so have no need for special words for powers of ten.
Not an answer, as this covers bases, but possibly helpful: https://googology.wikia.org/wiki/Misalian_base-naming_system
After some thinking, I think I can confirm how it should. Let me self-plagiarize from this post on Code Golf SE, with respect to the updated phonology and orthography.
Though this conlang's numeral system is still essentially decimal, it expresses run-length encoding on zeros. (Thanks @Austin for suggestion)
The basic words for the nonzero digits are:
1 = uma
2 = piso
3 = terra
4 = qarte
5 = pamta
6 = soçi
7 = sete
8 = oto
9 = mowe
Note that the vowels in these words are all positive. (Yep, now my conlang has vowel harmony.)
For every positive integer, with its decimal expansion, let d be the least significant nonzero digit.
First, d shall be spelled out like above.
Second, if d has any trailing zeros, the length of the zeros shall be spelled out recursively, with the lastly spelled word having its vowels replaced by their negative counterpart (represented by circumflexes).
Third, if d was not the most significant digit, "wa" shall attach to the lastly spelled word as a suffix. And then d and its trailing zeros (if any) shall be stripped off, and the remaining digits shall be spelled out recursively.
All the words spelling out an integer shall be hyphenated.
Examples:
1 = uma
2 = piso
7 = sete
10 = uma-ûmâ
11 = umawa-uma
12 = pisowa-uma
19 = mowewa-uma
20 = piso-ûmâ
42 = pisowa-qarte
69 = mowewa-soçi
100 = uma-pîsô
109 = mowewa-uma-ûmâ
440 = qarte-ûmâwa-qarte
666 = soçiwa-soçiwa-soçi
1945 = pamtawa-qartewa-mowewa-uma
2000 = piso-têrrâ
2022 = pisowa-pisowa-piso-ûmâ
2080 = oto-ûmâwa-piso-ûmâ
44099 = mowewa-mowewa-qarte-ûmâwa-qarte
44100 = uma-pîsôwa-qartewa-qarte
10^60 (one novemdecillion) = uma-soçi-ûmâ
10^63 (one vigintillion) = uma-terrawa-sôçî
10^63 + 2 × 10^33 (one vigintillion two decillion) = piso-terrawa-têrrâwa-uma-mowewa-pîsô
10^100 (googol) = uma-uma-pîsô
10^(10^100) (googolplex) = uma-uma-uma-pîsô
The asymptotic complexity of this numeral system has logarithmic upper bound. As for the lower bound, I haven't calculated it precisely, but it is at most super-logarithmic.
You could do what humans normally do when dealing with arbitrally long numbers - treat them as strings.
We don't normally use values higher than milion in daily life - would you dictate a 10 digit phone number* as
"Six bilions**, two hundred eighty three milions, one hundred eighty five thousands, three hundred seven"
Or as
"Six two eight three one eight five three zero seven"?
They could be grouped in sets of three digits (the holy trinity), and if you really wanted, you could prepend each set with triad ordering number (or names of saints if going for religious vibes)
"Six in 4th triad, two hundred eighty three in 3rd triad, one hundred eighty five in 2nd triad, three hundred seven in 1st triad".
OR
"Six in name of Michael, two hundred eighty three in name of Joseph, one hundred eighty five in name of Lucas, three hundred seven in name of Adam".
* Please don't call it. Using a beginning of very important constant as example.
** Definition of bilion gets finicky based where you are, here means 1000 Milions.
The number is τ (or 2π) for those curious
@AlexLamson 01189998819991197253 would have been an even nerdier option :)
One could also group by other digit counts, as the Indian numbering system does - a new name occurs every two digits after the thousands - that is, 10^3, "thousand"; 10^5, "lakh"; 10^7, "crore"; 10^9, "arab"; 10^11, "kharab", etc.
In the spirit of functional programming, you can add run length encoding.
Practically speaking, we see that there is no more effective of a method for naming numbers than giving them a sequence of digits. This is exactly what we do in mathematics. 513843843246213513513813502162324713513541263 is simply best described as that series of digits.
So the issue is specifically that the people speaking your conlang come across cases with long strings of the same digit quite often (as we do).
The solution is to permit explicit run length encoding
The number 1000000 might be expressed as 1 (run 6 0) a 1 followed by a run of 6 0s. This would also solve the issue of repeat numbers in a number. You might describe 16333333337 as 1 6 (run 8 3) 7
If I can venture a guess as to how your Haskel based language works, I am guessing 1 6 (run 8 3) 7 would be read as "UnelSoxelConsRunelOkelTerSet," using "Run" as the phonem for this run operation, and inventing a new particle, "Cons" which starts a new cons list (you didn't mention this, but it strikes me as an essential particle for a Haskel based language. Haskell gets its power from directed acyclic graphs, not just sequences)
Note that the named quantities like million and billion are useful. They give us hints as to the rough size of the number before we hear every single digit. But for explicitness, run length encoding works fine. You might want to prefix large numbers with a number of digits as a hint.
For arbitrary large numbers, which may not run length encode well, a checksum may be in order. A well chosen check-summing scheme may also allow for correction of errors in communication, not just detection.
Both issues can be solved simultaneously.
Consider for a moment how you say 1 239 475 612 034 in English. It’s not (usually) said as:
one two three nine four seven five six one two zero three four
Instead, it’s read out as:
one trillion two hundred thirty nine billion four hundred seventy five million six hundred twelve thousand and thirty four
The ‘normal’ way to read it is much longer, but those extra words serve an important purpose, they provide information about where in the number you are, which in helps reduce errors (in information theory terms, they serve as a very limited form of in-band error correcting code).
The same feature of the language also makes powers of ten very compact.
For your language, you can go a step further, and make the names of the powers of ten composable. English does this to a limited degree for the tens and hundreds places (so, for example, you have ‘ten thousand’ and ‘one hundred million’), but there’s no reason that it needs to be limited to just a three-digit arrangement. The caveat is that I would expect digit grouping to match up with however wide this ends up betting before looping (so, for example, if you go with one million being the largest power of ten you have a special name for, I would expect the digit grouping in written form to separate digits into groups of 10).
That's an integer. Now, how do you say 1.239 475 612 034? No one says "1 decimal two hundred thirty-nine thousandths four hundred seventy-five millionths six hundred and twelve billionths and thirty four trillionths". It's "one decimal (string of digits)". When you give your credit card number over the phone to order something, do you say "one quadrillion, two hundred thirty-four trillion, five hundred sixty-seven billion, eight hundred ninety million, one hundred twenty-three thousand, four hundred fifty-six" or do you just say say "1234567890123456"?
@KeithMorrison The OP only asks for integers, and my suggestion does not preclude alternative methods for decimals or reading off digits.
For precise integers, I see no viable systematic alternative that covers them all up to arbitrary size. But often, you don't need precise integers with all digits specified, spelled out, and spoken. For unprecise integers you can design some spoken form of exponent notation (like 1.0E9 in some programming language notation).
If -el "applies", I'm not sure about using it between digits. By that logic, KarelBis would be 4 applied to 2, so 2^4. Going that route, and assuming base 10 is the more common counting system in your world, you would need a word for 10, eg. Dix (from French). So 1001 would be DixelDixelDixUn: 10 * 10 * 10 + 1. Or these moderators could use prime numbers (important in cryptography) to communicate among themselves. If -el is the concatenator for powers, and let's say -id is the concatenator for multiplication (and no concatenator for addition), then 4837560 would be TerelBisidTeridPanidSetidDixTeridKaridDixelDixKaridDixTer. That is, 2^3 x 3^1 x 5^1 x 7^1 x 13^1 x 443^1 with 443 = 4 * 10 * 10+4 * 10+3, though I don't see a way to put that in parenthesis. Harder than spelling out the digits!
You can have some fun with this.
If the moderators resemble humans and are not good at repeating identical strings an exact number of times, then you can use something like Hebrew numerals or Greek numerals but with short syllables. The idea being that you effectively have multiple series of digits that cover different place value positions. Combining this idea with a simple collection of syllables that run in some order will give you a number system that's pronounceable but lets you skip zeroes when the gaps can be determined from context.
One problem with a system like this is that it takes up a lot of space. Either many numbers will be homophones with non-numbers or the numbers will be occupying some very important real estate and the rest of the language will have to adapt.
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1320 | Is is okay that most consonant assimilations result in a phone whose dedicated letter doesn't exist?
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. A lot of consonant assimilations happen in this language. This language is supposed to be spoken by angels.
My native language is Korean, btw. Korean also has many consonant assimilations.
Orthography and phonetics
My conlang uses Latin alphabets except W. No diacritics. All of them is pronounced as their IPA counterpart, except four:
C = [qʼ] (Voiceless uvular ejective)
N = [ɴ] (Voiced uvular nasal stop)
Q = [ʔ] (Glottal stop)
X = [ǃ] (Voiceless alveolar click)
Sounds exotic, huh? That makes 19 consonants and 6 vowels.
Plosives are tenuis by default.
Consonant assimilation
In my conlang, syllables have structure of (C)V(C). So two syllables can make two adjacent consonants. Every combination of two consonants can occur. That's where consonant assimilation happens, and also where this question arises. Let's call CC "former consonant" and "latter consonant", respectively:
Plosives as the former consonant get no release. Examples: "BK" to [b̚.k], "KB" to [k̚.b].
"H" as the former consonant usually assimilates to [x].
"V" as the former consonant usually assimilates to [ʋ].
"H" as the latter consonant...:
...turns voiced plosives to implosives. Example: "BH" to [ɓ].
...makes fricatives pharyngealized. Example: "FH" to [fˁ].
...makes nasal stops voiceless. Example: "MH" to [m̥].
...makes voiceless plosives aspirated. Example: "KH" to [kʰ].
"J" as the latter consonant usually makes the former consonant palatal or palatalized. Examples: "MJ" to [mʲ], "SJ" to [ɕ].
A plosive followed by "L" has lateral release.
"V" as the latter consonant usually makes the former consonant labialized. Example: "XV" to [ǃʷ].
"CH", "DJ", "DZ", "PF", "TJ", "TS" assimilate to affricates.
To show all combinations:
I set these consonant assimilations to make pronunciation easier, but my concern is that these introduce too many new phones that lacks their own letters. Are they tolerable?
Why shouldn't they be? Consider that there are many natural languages whose orthography does not accurately reflect their ... phonography? phonology? (not sure what word is correct here - "It's not one sound per letter".)
This doesn't even rise to the level of "digraphs", this is straight up allophony! Unless your angels pay very close attention to the sounds their mouth parts produce, I doubt they'd even notice the difference.
I would argue that the orthography of your conlang is not just OK but really excellent given your description of the phonology.
Why is this the case? It keeps the number of letters needed to write the language in a very comfortable range. The additional sounds are given by digraphs, a method that is often preferable over adding more letters to the basic alphabet or adding diacritics to the base letters.
I also imagine that the orthography keeps morphemes recognisable assuming that at least some morphemes are just CVC syllables and combining them results in assimilation.
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1966 | For analytic / isolating languages, how complex are the grammar rules for ordering the words in a sentence?
For a language like Chinese, or other conlangs which are mostly analytic/isolating, how complex does the grammar get in terms of ordering words in a sentence. After looking at Mandarin Chinese (not knowing much of it), I see there are at least probably 100 rules for where to put words in a sentence, such as this:
In Chinese, the time at which something happened, is happening, or will happen appears at the beginning of the sentence or immediately following the subject.
What do you need in terms of grammar rules (roughly speaking) for ordering words in a sentence if you are analytic/isolating? Can you have free word order, or must you really restrict things in some fashion? Why are there so many word order "conventions" in Mandarin Chinese, is that common in analytic/isolating languages?
How familiar are you with constituency syntax?
Not familiar at all at this point.
Isolating and Analytic languages tend to have a more rigid word order because they lack the encoded information of inflectional/derivational morphemes. As such, these types of natural languages rely on the word order or additional content words to convey meaning. Natural languages that allow for "free word order," or more accurately less strict word orders encode grammatical info (Case/Tense/Gender/Number/etc.) into each word, often relying more on these morphemes and agreement to convey the intended meaning. Even if word order is ignored, the same meaning would be conveyed by the included morphemes. These morphemes are what allow for a language to easily change its preferred word order.
To keep the structure and word order of an analytic/isolating conlang, one can focus more on the way that constituents come together to form noun phrases, verb phrases, and clauses. That said, natural languages can also be flexible and allow multiple, acceptable constructions, but "certain conventions" would be the most common pattern used native speakers. In English, one could say "the red, big dog caught the ball" and be understood although convention would dictate "the big, red dog caught the ball" as more acceptable. However, "the ball the big, red dog caught" would change the meaning entirely or be considered ungrammatical.
Having personally studied Mandarin Chinese and White Hmong (both strong analytic languages) I found that word order was very strict when dealing with the positions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, and prepositions, but they had different approaches in how clauses could come together.
Slioussar, N. (2011). Processing of a Free Word Order Language: The Role of Syntax and Context. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 40(4), 291–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-011-9171-5
Gell-Mann, M., & Ruhlen, M. (2011). The origin and evolution of word order. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(42), 17290–17295. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113716108
For free word order, marked accusative is sufficient. No subject-verb agreement is necessary. This was shown by L. L. Zamenhof in the creation of Esperanto.
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1960 | Languages without adpositions?
What does it look like with a language without adpositions of any kind? I saw there are about 30 languages without adpositions listed here, but couldn't find resources on the ones I checked. I even found one case which I answered here of Somali avoiding adpositions:
dekedda agteeda: near the harbour -> [the harbour her vicinity]
But I couldn't find anything else. Could you provide a few examples of what it would look like in a few languages?
The purpose of an adposition is to show how a noun relates to the rest of the sentence. In English, we indicate two particular types of relationship (subject and object) with nothing but word order, and use prepositions for all1 the rest.
So what are some other ways of doing this, other than adpositions?
Case marking can take over a lot of these. In English we need to use prepositions to indicate possessors, beneficiaries, and circumstances. In Latin, there are special case markers for all three of those (genitive, dative, ablative). Old Hittite has even more, and can express things like location (locative) and destination (allative) with case alone. Finnish has even more and can express identity (essive), lack (abessive), accompaniment (comitative), and more. The more cases you have, the fewer prepositions you need.
Sometimes the line between case marking and adpositions can be blurry. Sumerian and Japanese both attach their case markers to phrases rather than words. Some people consider these cases; others consider them postpositions.
Another option is relational nouns, where these sorts of relationships are expressed by more specific nouns. Swahili has one standard way to combine nouns, and to get specific meanings like "on" or "in" or "behind", you combine a noun with another noun meaning "top surface" (juu) or "interior" (ndani) or "space behind" (nyuma). It doesn't appear on that list, I imagine, because its "one standard way to combine nouns" acts a lot like an adposition, but you could replace that with a genitive case without losing anything.
1 Prepositions plus the postposition/clitic/case marker 's, which it's hard to put a label on because it behaves like nothing else in the language.
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2159 | Problems with this system for compound words?
I was thinking of having all "base" words in the budding conlang I'm working on start and end with a consonant (and be 1-4 syllables), with 1 vowel between each consonant. So like banakan or man or bud. Then compound words are simply the joining together of those base words, creating consonant clusters: manbanakan or budman.
In the case that two of the same consonants appear at the join point, then an s or z is inserted (depending on if the previous consonant is voiced or not):
gap
pul
gapspul
In the case where two s's are together, insert an l:
gas
sul
gaslsul
But for most words, it's going to be the first case like manbanakan.
The question I have is based on this fact, all of my words are written separately by default (like an analytic language like Chinese). So say man means mind and bud means awakened state. Then budman means "awakened mind". But bud man means "awakened mind" too, it's just that when you create a word for it, it's like in Sanskrit, it becomes more of a unit in your mind (budman), while the separate words is less of a unit and more of a "descriptive phrase" (bud man).
The problem is, when speaking, how can you tell the difference between budman and bud man? Is it possible to somehow tell the difference when speaking?
My other option is to have a "joiner" syllable, like ya, to make it unambiguous:
bud man (descriptive phrase)
budyaman (one word unit)
But that adds two characters/glyphs, and an extra syllable, which I'd like to avoid if at all possible, to keep it closer to the brevity of a language like Sanskrit.
Imagine having 3 or 4 words joined together into a single unit:
bud man banakan (descriptive phrase)
budmanbanakan (no separator, as unit)
budyamanyabanakan (ya separator, as unit)
One subjective call (comments please) is, how can I decide on which is better:
budmanbanakan (no separator, as unit)
or budyamanyabanakan (ya separator, as unit)
The main question though is, if I went with the "no separator, as unit" version like budmanbanakan, how do I understand that as a unit when speaking, as opposed to saying bud man banakan?
When speaking, it's not like I put pauses between each word I say (for example, when speaking English), the words sort of blend together. I can't think of any English words which fit this pattern, maybe "doorbell" or "doorstep", vs. "door bell", etc.. Can you tell the difference?
Maybe I add stress on the last syllable, budmanbanakán, vs. having each word get its own stress like búd mán banakán, but even then I can't quite tell the difference.
So maybe adding the -ya- separator isn't that big a deal in the end, given my desire to create lots of compound words. I can't decide yet.
Maybe German or other languages can offer some insight here, when they create compound words, do they run into this problem? I know for Sanskrit at least, they have sandhi, meaning the join point often changes. I don't want to do that, I want to have no changes at the join point. But not sure how I can get away with that yet, when speaking.
You could just leave it ambiguous. Languages are not usually very precise anyway, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. It would also provide a nice way for future diachronic language changes.
If you need to make noun compounds distinct from groups of nouns together, there are a few different ways natural languages do it.
Phonological changes
Most phonological effects only happen within words, not between words. If vowel harmony happens between the two halves of a compound, for example, that clearly demonstrates that it's a compound.
Morphological changes
In many languages, nouns have some sort of morphology on them: case marking, for example. In a compound, this morphology might only be applied once, while in a group of nouns, it could be applied to every word. Alternately, you have explicit morphology for making a compound, like a morpheme that goes between the components.
Prosodic changes
Prosody tends to be different within a word than between words. You might say each word has exactly one ictus (accent location), for example, so a compound has one but a group of nouns has more.
Which way is better do you think, to have -ya- or not to have it?
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1713 | Are there examples of languages where prepositions are treated as nouns/verbs/adjectives instead?
I am struggling figuring out how to consider "function" words (like particles or prepositions) in a conlang. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives have been relatively straightforward but not these function words. Here are 70 prepositions from English:
aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, anti, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, concerning, considering, despite, down, during, except, excepting, excluding, following, for, from, in, inside, into, like, minus, near, of, off, on, onto, opposite, outside, over, past, per, plus, regarding, round, save, since, than, through, to, toward, towards, under, underneath, unlike, until, up, upon, versus, via, with, within, without
Some are movement/location/position based, some are containment, etc..
Are there any languages which lack treating these kinds of words like this, and instead treat them as nouns, verbs, or adjectives/adverbs ("features"/modifiers)? If not, why not? If so, what are some examples?
Swahili has very few actual prepositions; in most cases where English would use a preposition, Swahili uses a noun.
Paka iko ndani ya sanduku.
cat located inside of box
The cat is in the box.
Paka iko juu ya meza.
cat located top of table
The cat is on the table.
Nitakwenda nyumbani baada ya kesho.
I-FUT-go home-LOC after of tomorrow
I'll go home after tomorrow.
These "prepositions", ndani, juu, baada, are syntactically just class-9 nouns meaning "the inside", "the top", and "the time after"; as nouns, they can be joined to other nouns with -a "of". Swahili really likes its nouns and uses them in many cases where English would want a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, etc.
Notably, the main reason English has so many prepositions is because they used to be an open class. All the ones starting with "be-", for example, are derived from nouns.
Cool! Where can I find a list of those things in Swahili. Hoping that even words like "with" and "as" and "to" are treated as nouns as well :)
@Lance Any good dictionary should include them. Swahili still has some true prepositions, but far fewer than English; most spatial and temporal relationships are indicated with nouns. Others function as conjunctions: "with" for example is often conveyed by "and".
I have the Swahili Learners' Reference Grammar, but it doesn't explicitly say the reasoning behind what is a preposition and what is like you are saying, which is kind of unhelpful. Also it appears that some things I asked for are still prepositions in Swahili (like "by").
@Lance There's not really a "reasoning" behind it; some things are prepositions and some are relational nouns and that's just how it works.
Okay, well the idea of relational nouns is new to me, so that is helpful as well.
@Lance For whatever reason, these Swahili nouns are not usually called relational nouns, but I don't know why.
See also these questions on [linguistics.se]: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/31069/9781 and https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/31075/9781
I faced English prepositions with the same bewilderment.
Anybody should... I drew out a list of adposition "functions" using Spanish's smaller set. I am usually looking at my own table, not the English/Spanish, but I do not recall needing to add any adpositions to that list in many dozen (maybe 100+ by now) pages of different translations.
For my own conlang, I worked up a set of "position" verbs which filled the functions through their several verb forms,
intransitive
"Fred ins" being "Fred enters"
or transitive with objects in different cases
"Fred ins ACC-yard" being "Fred is inside the yard"
"Fred ins DAT-yard" being "Fred goes into the yard"
"Fred ins GEN-house" being "Fred goes in from the yard"
"Fred ins INS-house" being "Fred goes through the yard"
I had extra spaces left on my VerbxCase multiplication table. I assigned those to other common verbs: "Fred fars" -> "Fred is unfamiliar."
Lojban has quite a few gismu (predicate words) that are essentially prepositional in meaning, but their grammar and usage is the same as any other predicate, in which they are similar to verbs.
Vietnamese (and maybe Chinese) also uses verbs to indicate meanings where English uses prepositions.
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1670 | Were there serious a priori fictional languages before Tolkien?
By serious I mean somewhat complete, with a working grammar. So the examples in Gulliver's Travels are probably not really "languages" (or are they, I'm not sure).
Baleybelen (~14c?) is often considered as the oldest well-documented a priori conlang. Much older than Solresol (1827). Unfortunately, I know no Turkish so I can't really tell what the content. The Wiki page say that, akin to Lingua Ignota, Baleybelen is thought to be a religion-motivated or language for poetry (maybe related to Sufism?). But unlike Lingua Ignota which borrowed most of its structure and vocabulary from Latin, Baleybelen is thought to be an a priori language.
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1357 | Inventing A Plural Form For First And Second Person
I am working on the pronoun system for my conlang.
The table below illustrates what I have ended up with so far.
I am looking for suggestions on how - if even needed - to implement a plural form that only includes the first and second person, but not the third (1+2+2+...).
Should I replace the dual form and let it be up to the context, wether its 1+2 or 1+2+2+...
Or should I implement a total new form for it and how would I name it then?
You can do whatever you want. Languages collapse distinctions in lots of various ways. For example, English used to have separate singular and plural second person pronouns (as well as different case forms), now it doesn't, but in some informal English varieties it does again. So just do whatever you want.
Is your language spoken by a fictional group or just for fun?
It's not related to any. I treat mine as an intelectual projekt - so rather just for fun, yes.
In that case, especially, you should do what appeals to you. What are your thoughts about one way or the other?
Interesting question! This seems like a reasonable thing to do, but I can’t find a language which does it. I’m pretty certain at least that it wouldn’t fit into the ‘dual’ paradigm — my understanding is that first person dual is pretty straightforwardly two people, me and you. Perhaps you’re best off giving it an entirely new place in the paradigm?
Your right probably, I might call it 1. Exclusive and name 1+3+3 2. Exclusive. @bradrn
See also this question on [linguistics.se] (of course, this one is on natlangs, in a conlang you can do things no known natlang provides): https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28316/inclusive-pronouns-can-there-be-more-than-one
Arguably you can't have 2+2, it's always 2+3, because each hearer understands you-plural to mean me and others.
I think this question should be closed. It's not so much a question of how to do this or even whether it's possible, as you literally answer yourself (i.e. just define a pronoun that combines first person singular and 2nd person plural: 1+2+2+2...). This is a question of terminology: how to call such a pronoun.
After thinking about this a bit, I realised that you are basically describing a minimal–augmented pronoun system. In a minimal–augmented system, each person comes in two pronominal forms: minimal, which is singlar for 1, 2 and 3, but dual for 1+2; and augmented, which is more than minimal. Slotting your pronominal table into this system gives the following:
Minimal
Augmented
1
1+3+3+…
1+2
1+2+3+…
2
2+2+…
3
3+3+…
But now that I look at this table, I notice something odd. See, the augmented form of 3 is many 3s, and the augmented form of 2 is many 2s. But the augmented form of 1 refers to many 3s! This is odd, especially considering that a first person plural pronoun is usually 1+1+… — no need to drag random third persons into it. Similarly, your augmented 1+2 pronoun should be many first and second persons, without third persons. Thus, your 1+2+2+… form should be the augmented 1+2 pronoun:
Minimal
Augmented
1
1+1+…
1+2
1+2+1+2+…
2
2+2+…
3
3+3+…
Or, if you prefer, you can shoehorn it into a more ‘traditional’ form and call it a first person inclusive plural:
Have you considered agglutinative pronouns? At least initially, in the precursor language, henceforth "Old Simplicius". Start with three pronouns that are strictly 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person with a singular and plural form. Then to specify "me and you" just straight up say "me and you", and so on for the other combinations. As Old Simplicius evolves into Middle Simplicius, these get ossified into particular forms - so "me and you" is always "meyou" rather than "youme" or whichever way you go, it's up to you. Then as Middle becomes Modern, they get smushed up by sound changes until they look as little or as much like each other as you please.
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1345 | How could the future "Kesh" language from the book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K. Le Guin develop from modern languages?
In the book Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the author created the future Kesh language and Aiha alphabet. Does anyone with an anthropological or etymological background and experience with this book have any idea how modern languages would evolve into this? Could it just be English + 5000 years, or does it seem like there's other languages that got mixed in?
From the back of the book it is stated that their written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable which is quite a shift from modern English, but it seems like they may be many thousands of years in the future which would allow for such drastic changes. Some words such as "kailikú" for "quail" have the similar hard /k/ and "sleep" is translated to "lahe" which seems to be pronounced similarly to "lay". These seem to be fairly rare and most words have no obvious connection or similar pronunciations.
5000 years is a really long time for linguistic evolution, and after such a long time little resemblance between the original and the final outcome is left. So almost anything is a plausible outcome.
The feature "written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable" has a nice scientific name alloglottography and it was quite common in the Ancient Near East. I wonder how it can survive in a society Ursula LeGuinn describes for the Kesh people because it is definitely harder to maintain than the knowledge of a simple alphabetic writing of the spoken vernacular.
The alphabet looks like a new invention but it shows some superficial similarities to Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and may have evolved from them. Or it was just reinvented at some point of time after a period of illiteracy.
Thanks for introducing me to the word alloglottography, some interesting future readings on that concept. My understanding of their society for how the written language survived seems to be that it was an important system for documentation of procedures and traditions, while the spoken language was used for day to day purposes. I suppose in that way its like current mathematical notation for us, we keep it around for the sciences and math, but has next to no use in spoken language.
Could it be based on shorthand perhaps? Seems there's similarities to Gregg and Pitman
Pitmann's shorthand was a source of inspiration to the Canadian Aboriginal Sylabics (more in the linked Wikipedia article)
It's also worth noting that we currently have no attested examples of a language evolving over 5,000 years. We have attestations of languages from 5,000 years ago (that's right about when writing was first invented), but none of those languages have living descendants. We also have reconstructions of how the ancestors of English (and many other languages) might have looked 5,000 years ago, but these are far from certain. Five millennia is an incredibly long time.
So as Sir Cornflakes says, basically anything is plausible after such a long span of time. Certainly, such a distant descendant of English wouldn't be expected to have much in common with it. We might see similarities in some of the basic vocabulary (our word for "water" has changed remarkably little from Proto-Indo-European), or in the patterns of the grammar (a lot of our question words start the same way, just like they did in PIE, even if that starting sound has changed quite a bit), but really there's no feature of language that I would be surprised to see change over such a timespan.
I guess Coptic comes close to that timeline because it lost its status as a living language as late as in the 19th century CE.
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1347 | Is Russian a constructed language?
It is regulated directively by authorities even more strictly than programming languages!
E.g. During the reform of 1918 they just forbade letter Ъ аnd removed all those letters! In some cases letter Ъ was still needed, and they were replacing it by apostrophe during some period.
I think you would have been repressed if you had written something in the old Russian orthography...
Ъ didn't actually mean any sound and was a trash letter
First of all, a language reform can be controversial, not widely accepted and even authoritarian in its implementation and even stupid - it still doesn't make the language constructed.
Second, the roots of the reform we are talking here can be found in proposals of Russian linguistic society that precedes revolution for more than a decade. It was a common understanding in linguistic circles that this way or another Russian spelling should me modernised. For God sake, up to that moment students and pupils were memorising by heart usage of "ѣ" because for them there were no logic behind it at all.
Third, even if we will consider this particular spelling reform as inefficient or redundant (which it wasn't) - there was no attempts to regulate by it how people are actually talking and which grammar rules they are using. It remained exactly the same language it was before the revolution.
This is not a constructed language by the very definition of a constructed language.
Also you are very wrong about how transition of Turkish to the Latin alphabet was generally approved. It wasn't and some people were quite opposed to it.
Ironically, the example provided by you is closer (but it's still not) to a constructed language in that sense that Osmanic and modern Turkish differs way more than pre- and post-Revolution Russian.
No, this is language reform.
In 1928, the Turkish government replaced the entire alphabet in use with a modified Roman alphabet, abandoning the previous Arabic-based alphabet. Vocabulary reforms (mostly purism) were also introduced at this time.
In the late 19th century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda introduced reforms (simplifications, neologisms) in the Hebrew language to make it suitable for modern use.
The government of the People's Republic of China introduced Simplified Chinese characters starting in the 1950's with a goal of improving literacy.
None of these activities are normally considered conlanging.
I've seen Modern Hebrew described as a conlang; it's a far more arguable case than any change that mainly focused on the writing system.
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1370 | I am a writer, and am trying to write a language for my story, how should I start as a complete beginner of language?
As a writer, I am trying to write a language so that I can name places more originally, how can I start writing a bare bones language for my story?
Have a read of the linked question, and then you could ask a follow up question in more detail.
For place name specifically, also look at this question and its answers: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/665/designing-a-vocabulary-for-geographical-features
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1415 | Creation of Alphabets
If the creation of languages is called language invention what is the creation of writing systems called?
I don't think it's called Lettering because when I search for that on the net, I see that this is the creation of fonts. I would like to know what the practice or hobby of creating new writing systems is called.
Si a la creación de lenguajes se le llama conlanging como se le llama
a la creación de alfabetos?
No creo que sea Lettering porque cuando busco sobre eso en la red veo
que es la creación de tipografías. Quisiera saber como se llama a la
práctica o hobby de crear nuevos sistemas de escritura.
Sorry questions here need to be asked in English. Can you translate this?
El idioma de este sitio de Stack Exchange es el inglés. Publique su pregunta en inglés, o con una traducción al inglés, si desea recibir ayuda aquí. The language of this Stack Exchange site is English. Please post your question in English, or with an English translation, if you wish to receive help here.
I’m voting to close this question because it is not in English. Voto para cerrar esta pregunta porque no está en inglés.
@elemtilas If you're going to edit in a translation, you need to fix the question title too.
On reading this, I wondered whether "graphopoeia", by analogy with "glossopoeia"/"mythopoeia", was in use (or whether it might catch on if proposed). Not that "neography" is deficient, but it's also in use for novel orthographies in existing scripts. But it turns out "graphopoeia" has also seen use, for "visual onomatopoeia": (calligraphic) writing that resembles what it describes.
Neography
As with language invention, there are different names for fashioning writing systems.
While "conscirpt" and other "con-" forms are current, their problems are numerous. Neography is a well known term even beyond the art of language invention, well predating and certainly looking & sounding better than the alternatives.
Neografía
Al igual que con la invención del lenguaje, existen diferentes
términos para diseñar sistemas de escritura.
Aunque las formas "conscirpt" y otras del tipo "con-" son términos actuales, sus
problemas son numerosos. La neografía es un término bien conocido
incluso más allá del arte de la invención del lenguaje, y es mas anterior y
ciertamente luciendo y sonando mejor que las alternativas.
"Writing systems" are also called "scripts", so analogous to "language invention", you could call it "script invention".
However, the creation of languages as a hobby is also called "conlanging", from "conlang", shortened from "constructed language". By analogy, "constructed scripts" are sometimes called "conscripts", and the process of inventing them "conscripting". Note that while "conscripts" is pronounced with the same stress pattern whether you are referring to constructed scripts or individuals forced into government military service, the verb form moves the emphasis from "conSCRIPT" to "CONscript", and the participle form "CONscripting", when referring to the creation of writing systems.
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1608 | How does one go about designing phonotactics for a conlang?
Most every conlanger has heard of phonotactics. However, I have yet to encounter resources about how should one go about the design of a conlang's phonotactics. How should one go about creating a language's phonotactics?
I am not convinced about the premise, in fact most conlangers just design a phoneme inventory (often by designing an alphabet and pronunciation) and phonotactics is an emergent phenomenon.
Do you recommend deletion for the question? I feel it adds something to the site; a set of resources for learning about the creation of phonotactic systems could be useful.
No, I don't recommend it for deletion. Let's see what answers will come up. Unfortunately, the World Phonotactics Database is currently off-line.
Though I had never heard of phonotactics for years after I started my language, I found working on phonotactics very worthwhile. I would definitely do it at the start if I began a new language.
Why did I?
In the first big iteration of my language, I had many sounds and no concepts of phonotactics. To me, it never sounded good or distinctive because of this unintentional "anything goes." I could not see or hear any a pattern or rhythm in the sounds. Learning the concept of phonotactics gave me a framework to think how I could redo my phonetics altogether and have it come out differently. I deleted and redid each lexicon entry in the new system. For me, sound is important and motivating. Once the words had some structure and cohesive identity producing aesthetic value, generating words felt less like I'm just an RNG. It's been a lot of fun. I have made up thousands more words, rather more than doubling in 2.5 years what I had done without much enthusiasm in the 8 before. In part thanks to the purposeful aesthetic and cohesiveness, I've just about always enjoyed it more than I did for any words before this sound revamp. The greater enjoyment of generating words and concepts has made world-building more engaging and more immersive throughout.
Suggestions
You could take these in steps after first reading all the bullets.
Read what phonotactics is in more or less detail first if
you have not. 'Onset,' 'nucleus,' and 'rime' are useful at the very least.
Personally I am not familiar to recommend any of the large number of videos on this topic, but if you prefer that medium you might add your own useful resources answer.
Search videos for poetry and news broadcasts in multiple languages to find what sounds good to you. In my case, I picked one language as a phonotactical starting point, though multiple inspirations informed my language elsewhere. I would not spend too much time on it, but briefly picking a counterexample language could also be informative for the next step.
Study the phonotactics of your selected languages for insight and inspiration. Note how their syllables structure and don't structure in terms like CVC, CVCC, VC, etc.
Do you want syllable rules to change in the beginning, middle, or end of a word?
You're not trying to find every possible syllable in these languages. You want to recognize some patterns you like and hypothesize why. You'll test with your language.
Make a spreadsheet of your sounds/syllables for your reference. For instance, I noted which consonants and which vowels can appear in which position in a syllable, with the first syllable being different from mid-word syllables. In my case, I only allowed 3 consonants to "cluster" CC (e.g., my-), so I treated clusters like phonemes for spreadsheet convenience. You may benefit from a different format.
Start relatively restrictive to form a baseline of core syllables for your core words. As you make up more and more words and reconsider "Ok, maybe I shall allow k to end words after all" or something, you can polish in some less usual-sounding words onto your main line.
Brainstorm a bunch of cool-, alright-, and rule-breaking-sounding example words according to your rules. These proof of concept words don't need to be real or grammatical necessarily, just proof of concept. Shuffle and read these to test your above hypothesis. Do you like the phonotactic patterns you thought you would like? Why do you like what you like now?
Consider carrying on brainstorming while you're in the right gear so that when you're not you can draw on this pool of good words. I have a tinkering section at the top of my lexicon spreadsheet for words/definitions available, to-do, or up for revision, which I find helps workflow and organization.
Wherever you keep your lexicon (google sheets, for me), look into the tools like advanced find and replace, conditional formatting, slicers, etc. These will save you so much time if you ever decide to edit your phonotactics (or probably anything) or see how often you use certain patterns.
As you work on grammar or other aspects, you may now consider reserving certain phonotactical patterns for certain purposes. For examples, I make any word an adjective by repeating the first vowel and otherwise restrict duplicate VVs.
Make notes on how you are placing the word stress. Starting simply, develop word stress rules. You'll complicate these or realize they were more complicated already naturally as you get more used to your language.
Keep these phonotactical and prosodic rules both in mind and in a written reference as you devise and revise words. Sometimes you make up a nice-sounding word later to realize your pronunciation challenges your norms. When you understand what your rules are doing for you, you can understand whether to break them.
Some word-property concepts that might interest around this stage
Sonority Hierarchy
Phonostheme
Syllabic Consonant
Nonconcatenative Morphology
Vowel harmony (I don't know this site's tool at all; just the explanation was clear)
Voiceless Vowel
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1835 | How to romanize velarization, palatalization, and labialization?
I started a conlang inspired by Marshallese and Navajo, and have taken several labialized, palatalized, and velarized consonants from them. However, I am unsure how to romanize these consonants.
You have three main options here:
Use new letters for each one. Latin does this, with C /k/ vs Q /kʷ/. This will get infeasible if you have a lot of them.
Have diacritics for palatalization, labialization, and velarization. This is common in Eastern European languages that use the Latin alphabet, contrasting T D N vs Ť Ď Ň and so on. The downside to this method is that they can get difficult to stack, if you can have e.g. a palatalized labialized stop.
Have separate letters that mean "palatalized", "labialized", and "velarized". Most modern forms of Cyrillic do this, with the letters Ь and Ъ indicating whether the preceding consonant is palatalized or not. IPA also does this: tʲ, tʷ, tˠ.
Which one you choose mostly comes down to your sense of aesthetics, and how you expect the language to be written/typed.
listing Cyrillic solely in the third category seems odd to me, seeing as East Slavic (which is what most people not specifically knowledgable about e.g. the languages of the Northern Caucaus, Central Asia, or historical languages tend to think of as the prototypical form of Cyrillic) is arguably more like the first option, but with the different letters being those for the following vowels (with the yer's only being used word-finally or before a palatalising vowel for /ʲj/ or /ˠj/ respectively)
I am not sure if infeasible is the right word because I have eight separate distinguishing pairs, but the other two seem more elegant.
Seems like something I can do, especially since I am handwriting everything in a notebook rather than typing it onto a spreadsheet.
Again seems attainable. In fact, I have in this short time been distinguishing palatalization with a j digraph because I do not have j in my romanization. Unsure what to do with labialization though.
I am torn between options 3 and 2.
In addition to the methods given by others, you could also try the Irish approach (which has similarities to the Cyrillic systems): divide your usual vowel letters into sets for each coarticulation, then only allow vowel letters that match the consonant's coarticulation to be written adjacent to it.
This works perfectly nicely when you have palatalising vowels before and after palatal consonants, but when you don't you end up needing to insert additional vowel letters that are not present as distinct vowel phonemes in order to ensure that no vowel is next to a consonant it doesn't match coarticulation with.
This is why the Irish form of the name Mary, Máire has an <i>, despite being pronounced with an /ɑ:/ or /a:/ in the first syllable (depending on dialect). The r is soft (palatalised) and so cannot appear next to the <á>, and so an <i> is inserted.
This process is also one major factor that can make Irish vowels difficult to predict from the spelling (even within a given dialect), as it's not always clear which of the vowel letters are phonemically present, and which are just there to mark coarticulation of the consonants.
Depending on your goals that could be either an advantage or a disadvantage.
Here's another option:
If basically every consonant has a palatalized (resp. labialized, velarized) form, consider transforming the following vowel letter instead of the consonant letter itself. This is what Cyrillic does, in addition to the "hard" and "soft" signs that Draconis mentioned. It has ten vowel letters, five "hard" (un-palatalizing) and five "soft" (palatalizing). It's a bit more complicated than that, since the Slavic languages have evolved considerably since the Cyrillic alphabet was invented to accommodate them. Case in point: the letter I only appear in digraphs now, to the point that those digraphs are in the alphabet, but I itself is not.
If you have a separate -ized form for each one, digraphs are probably your best bet. Depending on what other sounds you have and how you romanize them, you could use j, w, and x (i.e. tʲ tʷ tˠ are tj tw tx). But of course, it's up to you.
Another way you could do it (this is Mark Rosenfelder-style) would be to use the IPA characters themselves (i.e. tʲ tʷ tˠ are tʲ tʷ tˠ). This is another aesthetic, and works really well if that's the aesthetic you're going for. I find it gives exotic vibes. But it comes down to personal preference overall.
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1881 | Are there any general rules for creating verb conjugation for a conlang?
So I have been thinking a lot about trying to make my own conlang. I have attempted before to create one in the past, however, all of them have sadly been abandoned. Looking back at them (since I still have the original pieces of paper for all of them), it seems that I have always had a difficult time with creating the verb conjugations for the conlang for some reason. Are there any general rules for creating verb conjugation for a conlang, or is there not?
Edit: Sorry about the confusion that I caused with my question (as pointed out by @nearsighted), I am asking about creating conjugations.
You should clarify if you mean creating conjugations, or morphologies. The former refers to entirely different ways that a verb can inflect. For example, a language might have samel-ôŋ "to run" become samel-iz "I run," while vêsa-kh "to cough" becomes vêsa-nu "I cough" ─ two completely different patterns. The latter refers simply to the forms that they take, and how they are used and interact with other morphological units. I'll adress each of these, and for both naturalistic and non-naturalistic languages.
Naturalistic
Conjugations
If you're making a naturalistic language using diachronics, then you should probably be able to make conjugations via sound change. Maybe the old suffix for 1st person was an -n suffix, and sound change nasalized vowels before nasal codas and replaced word-final CC clusters with CCa ─ then you get Conjugation 1 (words ending with vowels): nasalize the vowel, and Conjugation 2 (words ending with consonants): -na. ─ Or maybe the suffix was -gh. Then it disappeared and lengthened the vowel, and the long vowels raised to new short vowels. Now you get a vowel shift for words ending with vowels.
Or you could do something like this: perhaps the proto-language contrasted telic with atelic verbs, or some similar contrast, and different object pronouns were used ─ perhaps, like we sometimes do in English, atelic verbs could use prepositions before the objects (cf. "shot," "shot at"). Then the object pronouns attach to the verb to become agreement, and then the telicity distinction is mostly lost ─ now you have two conjugations.
Morphologies
This is much simpler. Just have an old multiword expression collapse into the verb (do some study on syntax and grammaticalization).
Non-naturalistic
If it's not naturalistic, just make everything up! But if you need inspiration, look up some real-world language's verbal systems, and take some ideas from those.
But non-naturalistic languages don't feel very fun ─ you can just do whatever you want. I would advise you to tread the beautiful path of naturalism, instead of making non-naturalistic languages (unless you're an auxlanger or engelanger).
I am so sorry about not clarifying, I was talking about conjugations, I'll edit my question to include that.
@CrSb0001 Thanks for that coveted green checkmark; however, it's generally best practice to not award it until after a couple of days have passed, because who knows? A better answer might be out there. Plus, once an answer is accepted, attention is drawn away from the question.
Sorry about that, I’ll keep that in mind (it’s also a pretty common mistake that I make on the Mathematics Stack Exchange but I’ll try to keep it in mind)
It's the headings. You need to put a line break (as in, press the enter or return key) after every HTML bracket, or at least the last one before the italics. To pad out the edit and make it stick, I made a few more hopefully invisible changes to the formatting. Feel free to revert them, but mind the italics
The first you should do is separating two things: What should be expressed in the conjugation, and the concrete design of the conjugation tables.
Note that languages can exist without any verbal conjugation, and all categories expressed by verbal conjugation can be expressed using other means or completely left out when sufficiently clear from context.
When you have verbal conjugation, there is a distinction between finite verb form and non-finite ones. Essentially, in a finite verb form all verbal categories are explicitly specified, but non-finite verb forms are deliberately vague about some or even all of them. The non-finite verb form comprise things like infinitives (a language can have more than one infinitive, Latin, e.g., has 6 of them), participles, verbal nouns, supines, verbal adverbs. The number of non-finite verb form varies greatly between the languages of the world, and there are even languages with (almost) no non-finite verb forms (see this question and its answers https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/46570/9781 for interesting examples).
Now to the point of what to put into a conjugation table, there are actually a lot of verbal categories (see The chapters labelled "Verbal Categories" in wals.info: Tense, Aspect, Voice, Mood, Evidentiality, Polarity (i.e. Negation), Person, Number, Gender, ... , and as conlanger you can be creative here and invent new verbal categories fitting to the world you build.
Last to the point of designing the conjugation tables: Take care of some kind of redundancy, when you have person marked in the conjugation, reuse the person markers, e.g., for different tenses (there may be some variation in them). Starting with a fully agglutinative morphology and than blurring it by using sound shifts and elisions of sounds is a good idea to achieve this. And you can have different conjugation classes, as covered in @Nearsighted's answer.
The thing about an artificial language is that you get to create the rules.
They can resemble any real language or be totally outrageous.
I recommend to you:
Skip over some general rules on how verb conjugation works
Look at some examples (I recommend more than 10 distinct languages)
Try to find a pattern, twist it, flip it, at the end that's how you'll arrive on what conjugation ought to achieve in your language
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1858 | How to prevent all of my words being eroded away to nothing
My latest project is a full language superfamily (the Thakina languages). I'm now at the fourth generation with Highlands Têyisa, and I'm noticing that most of the words are getting far, far shorter ─ for example, *ukomaj became simply we in HT, and probably would be further eroded in the future. Now, this is an extreme case (a more typical example might be *lokanu becoming lwe), but since I have two more generations to go, I'm beginning to get worried. Is there a way that I could restore some of the length and complexity of the words I started with through sound change, or would I have to use compounding / new words?
As a general rule, regular sound changes wear away at words, reducing their information content.
Countering this, morphosyntactic changes restore the lost information.
For example, let's look at Latin. Classical Latin has lots of case marking on nouns; amīcum means "friend" as a direct object, for example, while amīcō means "friend" as an indirect object. But in later Latin, coda m turned into nasalization on the vowel and then disappeared, and u and ō merged into o. Now these two forms were indistinguishable.
As they become less and less distinct, though, Latin-speakers still needed to convey this information. So during this period of merging, Latin-speakers started adding extra words to disambiguate: putting ad "toward" in front of the indirect object. As a result, by the time the forms had entirely merged, Latin had a new way to distinguish them: amico for the direct object and ad amico for the indirect object.
This is how it goes in general. When there's a difference that conveys important information, and that difference is getting worn away by sound change, people will add extra words to disambiguate. Wait long enough, and these extra words will get merged into the original ones: that's how we got "inkpen" in English. Southern US dialects merge /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before nasals, so "pen" became confusingly similar to "pin", and was disambiguated as "ink pen". Eventually these two words merged into a single one.
I live in the southern US, so believe me, I'm familiar with the pin-pen merger ... I have it, but most of my family doesn't. Don't hear "inkpen" too much, though, since "pin" isn't a very common word in common discourse (at least in urban areas).
One extreme example is modern Mandarin - phonetically different monosyllabic word in Classical Chinese were eroded to such an extent that there are only a few hundred distinct syllables left by now. What happened was that Mandarin started to differentiate the meaning by creating compounds, and now most of its words (词) are bisyllabic (bi-morphemic, if you like).
Sound shifts are to some amount irreversible. Long before your words are completely gone, the rate of homophones rises and the speakers of the language have to deal with it in some way or another.
The most common way of dealing with it is lexical innovation, one part of the homophone pair is replaced by a new word. Sources for that new word may be internal (formation of a compound, using another semantically related word that is already in the language, using some derivational morphology) or external (borrowing from some other language in your world).
There are other possible exits from the dilemma, e.g., using more and more conventionalised multi-word expressions like "to burn with fire" instead of simply "to burn", because your words for "fire" or for "to burn" have become too ambiguous to be used in isolation.
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1548 | What is the word-grammar transcription thing called?
What is the thing used under a sentence in a conlang that looks sort of like this: NOM-he.F-PAST said.F-PAST called?
I know I probably used it completely wrong in that example, but what is this called, and how does it work? Thanks in advance.
The thing is called a gloss. There is a widely used standard for such glosses, the Leipzig glossing rules.
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1613 | Creating a language for intelligent, sapient creatures that resemble large cats
In my world, there is a race of intelligent, sapient creatures that resemble large cats. They have fur, tails, and whiskers, and can purr and meow like regular cats, but they can also walk upright on two legs and use their front paws as hands. What would be the best way to go about creating a language for these creatures that sounds like a mix of meowing and purring?
You would start with the phoneme-inventory. What kind of distinct sounds can these creatures make? How can they be combined to form longer units? Would there be a gesture-based system? A sound could have different meanings whether the tail is wagging or not, for example. You probably end up having very few distinct sounds, so that's a constraining factor.
Then think what they would talk about most commonly. Food? Interpersonal relationships? Assign shorter units to more frequent elements.
As for grammar, that's really up to you -- there's nothing inherent in the nature of the speakers that influences the grammar.
As inspiration for a language that has a small vocabulary and simple syntax, have a look at toki pona; that might be a good starting point.
You might want to take a look at the Kzinti language (the "Heroes Tongue"), created by Larry Niven for the Kzinti (pretty much the creatures you described), in his Known Space Universe.
While it has a limited lexicon, it does have a complex system of modes and accents, based on feline anatomy, that may help you develop your language.
Given the behaviour of cats, the Kzinti have a society based on dominance and are very warlike. This is reflected in their language, as modes vary based on the rank of the person you are talking to. Modes are implemented by using the wide range of vocalizations cats can make. This range also contributes to complex melodic accents.
Hi @anonymoususer, welcome to Conlang.SE! Do you mind including a bit more information from your link in the actual answer itself? While you don't need to have every piece of information in the answer itself, we generally prefer for answers to be as self-contained as possible. For instance, can you please describe some examples of the "complex system of modes and accents" illustrating how it's specifically designed for feline anatomy? Thank you!
@Mithical I added some more information. I hope it is useful.
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1788 | Should I include a glossary with english translations in my fantasy novel?
I am writing a fantasy novel and I have created a few languages for it, these being Twergit (pronounced /'twer-git/ - I don't know IPA so I'm using Merriam-Webster pronunciation symbols, a guide can be found here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/assets/mw/static/pdf/help/guide-to-pronunciation.pdf), Faean (/'fā-in/), Urg-va (/ȯrg-'vä/), and Tharzhnik (/'thärzh-nik/).
I am wondering if I should include a glossary in the back with english translations of text in other languages that appears in the book like Christopher Paolini did in Eragon to help readers understand characters that speak in my conlangs.
It depends what the purpose of the languages is, and how they are used.
If there are only short stretches, and the meaning can be inferred from context, or is not vital to the story (like a comment on the weather or so), then a gloss might not be needed. In that case the purpose of using conlangs is mainly for atmosphere, to create a sense of strangeness or the unknown. Having other characters talk in an unknown language does not necessarily require the protagonist/reader to understand it -- this is what happens in real life after all when cultures meet.
However, if it is important to the plot, you want to make sure that the reader can understand it (and they might not be able to infer the meaning).
In the end it is your choice. You did go through all the work of creating these languages, rather than using random character sequences in your novel, so you might want to provide a gloss for your readers' benefit. It would also signal that you put the effort in, and that you give attention to details, which might make the readers overall enjoy it more.
YES
As a reader, I like when there is a glossary at the back. I also like a nice map at the front! It's always a pleasure to see that an author either took the time and effort to make a language or hired a language inventor to do that job properly. So my vote is YES.
Suggestions:
I would learn IPA. It's everywhere and it is the de facto standard in use by the language creation community. It'll make your life and everyone else's so much easier!
I would make your lexicon count by not just having a list of X = Y entries. Rather, give us some cultural, historical, linguistic background that may not have been specifically included in the text. Take a look at Tolkien's numerous appendices to see what I mean.
Might also want to rise above Paolini's dubious glossopoetic and literary output. I've never heard anything particularly good about either for all that he was hailed as a genius. There are better models to look at and learn from.
It depends on the style of your work. Adding such kind of glossary emulates a quite old-fashioned style of adventure books taking place in exotic regions, or travel journals to such regions. So when this is fitting to the overall setting of the story, it is fine.
It is also kind of OK when it does not really contribute to the atmosphere of your story and just provides some bonus bits of information for the fans of the work.
In fact, I cannot see any strong reason against it (saving a few pages of paper in a printed book, especially when you need additional 16 pages of paper because of binding restrictions might be one).
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1792 | What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
What sound changes are most common in natural languages, and in what order do they usually occur? Are there any factors to take into account when modelling sound changes for a conlang that is supposed to resemble a natlang?
@Ylahris Index Diachronica aims to show every documented sound change, but it is far from complete and it isn't always the best at clarifying which sound changes are generally accepted and which are disputed
By far the most common changes are assimilation, one sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound, and lenition, a sound shifting to require less articulatory effort. These are both broad categories that encompass a lot of more specific types of changes.
Assimilation can include:
A sound taking on an adjacent sound's features, like md > nd or zt > st
A cluster turning into a single sound, like ts > ss (total assimilation)
A sound becoming voiced between vowels (which are usually voiced), or voiceless at the edge of a word (next to the voiceless silence)
A vowel taking on the features of vowels in other syllables, like uti > yti (vowel harmony)
And various others!
Lenition can include:
Sounds using less of a closure, like k > x or x > h
Sounds disappearing entirely, like h > ∅ (deletion)
Vowels moving toward the center of the vowel space, like a > ə (laxing)
Long sounds being pronounced for less time, like tt > t (shortening)
Multiply-articulated sounds losing one of their articulations, like kw > k (or p)
And more!
Since these both reduce the amount of articulatory effort needed, they're very common types of changes. But they also generally involve losing information, so other types of changes will work to counteract this over time (for example, morphological changes to restore some of this information).
Really great answer, especially for simulating naturalistic evolution and change of conlangs over time
Things are probably hard to quantify, but some specific sound changes seem to be more frequent than others, most notably:
/h/ -> /∅/ (loss of /h/)
The consonant system often has gaps at /p/ and /g/:
/p/ -> any: is mostly /p/ -> /f/ or /p/ -> /ɸ/, can go further via /h/ to nothing /∅/
/g/ -> any: lots of choices, e.g., /g/ -> /ʤ/, /g/ -> /k/, /g/ -> /ɣ/ (and further to nothing /∅/)
Here are a couple sound changes I use when I'm not sure what to do:
Voiceless consonants becoming voiced between two vowels (intervocalic voicing)
[u] and [o] becoming [y] and [ø] in the environment _Ci (that is, when the next vowel is [i])
Voiceless nonsibilant fricatives becoming [h]
[h], [x], [ħ], or other weak consonants being lost and lengthening the previous vowel (compensatory lengthening)
Clusters of two voiceless stops becoming geminated forms of the second one (this is sometimes called Italian-style gemination)
Weakening voiced stops to liquids (e.g. [b] to [w])
this is a really great list. i'm used to weakening voiced stops to fricatives first ([b] to [v] or [β] and [d] to [ð] or [z]) before turning them to liquids and i never considered doing it straight away was an option
@justPaul thanks, I remember in Thakina I had the idea to do j to z and w to v, then replace the liquids with the voiced stops. I think that was the first time I used that sound change, and now it's a favorite of mine.
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1293 | How do you determine a New Letter's sound?
I'm trying to create a new language, but I need some advice. How do you determine what a new letter sounds like? Is there a pattern, or do I just make it up?
I'm not sure what you're asking. Usually a conlanger will think about what sounds we want before considering orthography.
By knowing your question and comment here I infer that you want to add one more letter to the known Latin alphabet and assign a sound to it, keeping the sounds of the other letters unchanged. Just add this and every other kind of specific information to your question to make it more focussed.
Please note that you can always edit your own questions and answers to improve them.
If you're designing a fully new language, it's usually better to pick phonemes (sounds) before even thinking about orthography. Writing should really come after even grammar.
If you're just designing a new writing system, then yeah, you just make it up.
Better still to start by considering classes of phonemes and the contrasts between them.
There are many ways of approaching the art of language invention. Some folks devise phonologies (sound systems) first; some people prefer to fashion logographies (writing systems) first. Still others like to write out a snippet of a song or poem first and try to sort out what just happened...
Whichever way you prefer to go, the basic answer to your question, depending on your philosophy of language invention, will be either the conlanger's answer: you make it up -- or else the glossopoet's answer: you discover the relation from within the language itself.
For example, if you came up with this letter:
§
you could either look through your chart and say: ah! that'll do nicely as the letter for [v]. Then it's just a matter of filling in the blank.
Or alternatively, you could delve into the history and culture of the people who speak the language and consider the prehistory of their writing systems (if any) and consider any sound symbology that might exist, and someone from that speech community might enter your dreams one night and teach you what sound that letter makes.
There may perhaps be a pattern: that too is something the conlanger will create or the glossopoet will discover along the way! Or there may not be a pattern at all.
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1158 | Has AI technology yet provide a language composed of multiple human languages yet?
I'm from South Florida and noticed that my Haitian neighbors speak a language called Creole. Then It got my fantasizing a possibility that is well within our reach of no more than a decade.
Using AI to create languages by mixing other languages.
Question
Does anyone know any specific technologies that provide practical languages yet?
Probably possible now using machine learning, but you'd have to convince an academic institution that it's worth doing.
@AndrewRay DARPA or Google might find it interesting. They waste money on anything.
What do you mean by "mixing" other languages? Vocabulary? Grammar? Arguably Esperanto goes some way towards this with its vocabulary taken from several language families.
Not really AI, but the vocabulary of the two logical languages Loglan and Lojban was created algorithmically from the vocabulary of pre-defined source languages. In this case, the phonemes of the words were picked by the algorithm which is different from the formation of a creole where whole words are picked by the human speakers.
This is something different from my first answer: Mixing syntax
There is a project named Galactical Dependencies where the authors started with dependency treebanks of some known languages and than created new artificial languages at a large scale by altering the typological features of the original language using features from other languages. This leads to new "languages" with a different syntax. Incidentally, the main motivation of that project was the lack of available treebanks for typologically interesting languages and so they created them artificially.
I am not aware of any conlanger tapping that ressource yet.
The problem I can see with trying to do this is that you would first need to be able to encode the urlanguages in a way that a computer could understand. One could imagine giving it corpora from the urlanguages and having a machine learning algorithm produce a new corpus in some pidgin or creole, but it's not very useful unless the computer can then explain what the new texts mean.
The problem of encoding meaning is definitely unsolved - Google Translate has come a long way in the past decade, but it's still far off from a human translator.
So I think in the end, it depends on the criteria you want to use to evaluate it. Does a language whose syntax and vocabulary can only be inferred count?
IF I ever get around to constructing a conlang I'll probably algorithmically generate its vocabulary from Wiktionary entries. Wiktionary includes pronunciations in IPA format (and audio files), spellings, and translations between hundreds of languages.
(I'd build up an inventory of easily distinguished phonemes, match words of like meaning, and then use machine learning to synthesize a vocabulary out of like-sounding synonyms.)
While some prominent conlangs have attempted something like this in the past, they were forced to cherry-pick and use subjective judgements. Today modern technology enables us to do it with a thoroughness and at a scale previously unfeasible. Lojban spliced together vocabulary from 6 languages; with machine learning and Wiktionary, we can algorithmically splice together hundreds.
I'd find it interesting to see what kind of language you would come up with if you algorithmically synthesized your vocabulary and pronunciations from Wiktionary's database of worldwide languages and developed your syntax from Galactical Dependencies' most representative grammars. Would it resemble Esperanto or Lojban, or would it look like something else entirely?
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1215 | Naming language based on real language
I apologize if similar question has already been answered, I tried to look for it but didn't find anything.
I'm trying to make a simple naming language that looks/sounds vaguely like nahuatl (if I manage it, I'd like to do this with more languages).
I tried Atwords, but I can't figure out the phonotactics and the results rarely look anything like the language I'm "imitating".
Real words tend to be long, hard to read and include lots of loan words.
Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?
Aside from Logan's answer, part of your problem may also be that Nahuatl locatives (assuming that's at least part of what you want to generate) have a very different formation system to most European languages. Whereas European languages usually are compounds with at least one element having an architectural ("farm", "field", "mill") or geographical meaning ("river", "bay", "city", "village"), in Nahuatl, locatives are formed mostly using a fairly small set of suffixes. This is an important feature to keep in mind if you want names that sound Nahuatl-y
Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and
create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an
insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?
There is: look it up. For example: Nahuatl Phonology.
Nahuatl phonotactics turn out to be pretty simple: maximally one onset consonant, a long vowel, and one coda consonant per syllable. Here's an Awkwords script that'll give you 100 random 3 syllable words conforming to Nahuatl phonology:
#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV(C)
n:100
nle
If you don't care about the source language morphology, that oughta be good enough. Not all of the words will be winners, but you can generate tons and just pick the few you like best.
To get words that really look like plausible source-language words, though, you do need to care about morphology. In that case, you do have to learn something about the source language, but not necessarily "an insane amount". For example, a simple change to that Awkwords script will generate plausible dictionary-forms of Nahuatl nouns with 3-syllable bases and <-tl> or <-tli> suffixes:
#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV[tl/CVtli]
n:100
nle
It is not too hard to look up lists of other morphemes and add their patterns into your word generator. If you want to get really fancy, you can try to find a pre-made computational morphological model for the source language (e.g., a PC-KIMMO or KLEENE or HFST file) and then generate random underlying forms to run through it, but that probably does start to get into the realm of "an insane amount of linguistics"...
There are a couple of decent middle ground, rather than copying the source language morphology. One is to generate a bunch of short, one-or-two-syllable con-morphemes of your own that match the source phonology, and then use those as the base units from which you generate conlang words, rather than going directly from the phonology.
Another is to try to imitate the source language phonemic distribution. For that, you basically just need a big list of source language words, from which you can extract statistical information. The simplest way to do that is to just count up occurrences of each phoneme, but if you know a little bit more statistics, or are willing to learn, you can construct a conditional distribution model for which phonemes occur most often in different particular positions, and then generate random words based on those specialized distributions, rather than the default uniform distribution. Awkwords can't handle that kind of model sophistication, but other word generators, like Logopoeist, can, and it's also not too hard to write up a custom generator just for your particular naming language.
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1182 | How to make names in a conlang?
So, draconic in the setting is used to name places, people, and communication in general. I skipped through most of the phonotactics as I'm using the Hungarian template. So as I filled out entries in my Swadesh list, I ran a small experiment:
arán (sun) + kile (feather) = Oh, f@ck me! How am I supposed to combine two words, this incompatible, into a pair of names?
More precisely, I had a name, Amrar (pronounce: Ámrár), created before through a different method and without having a whole conlang in mind. Compared to Aránkile (which I modified into Áranki/Árenkil, a male and a female form) its soft m, loud and clear á, and grizzly r does a good job of giving off the vibes you'd expect from a golden dragon, regal, powerful, intimidating but still kind. This worked when I was going for vibes, even if it had no meaning or roots in a language at the end. However, I feel like I'm writing myself into a corner with this vocabulary.
I don't want my language to sound like it was generated on vulgarlang.com. I have to maintain my control over the "loudness" curve of each word, their length and which phoneme I use, based on their place of articulation. What should I do to balance the "sounds like an orc/elf/typical politician" with the "names have a meaning"?
Not an answer, but what pops into my head is the way consonants change by being misheard or mispronounced by children then repeated. K becomes hard G, L becomes R, some letters get left out etc..
I don't really understand what your issue actually is. Arankile seems perfectly fine as a combined form. Can you clarify what it is you're looking for: what makes those words incompatible; what is it you're actually trying to do?
For an "Elvish" sound, look at this question and its answers: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/589/what-are-the-common-features-of-elvish-conlangs?rq=1
Note that you as the conlang designer control both ends of the chain: The final wordform and the etymology. So you can play with both parts until the result meets your wishes.
So you can start with the wordform Amrar and search for an etymology, splitting it up as Am-rar and find some meanings for Am and rar, say am is short for amon "hill, mountain" and rar is "roar, load noise", making your mighty dragon a "mountain-roar(er)". Tolkien used this approach a lot. The backside of this approach is that the conlang becomes difficult to maintain.
EDIT: Going the other way, starting with arán and kile, you can vary the order of the two stems, Maybe Kilarán sounds better than Aránkil? It is your decision. You can also throw in some sounds between the two stems, say Aránskil with an inserted s, you can insert a vowel, say a, to yield Aranakil, you can assimilate the n to the k giving Arángkil.
Starting with roots from your conlang, there are still a lot of creative possibilites to combine them in compounds: Inserting a Fugenelement (example from German Herz-ens-sache "affair of the heart", from Herz "heart" and Sache "thing, affair", ens being the Fugenelement without meaning), applying some assimilations or dissimilations, dropping syllables from long words (syncope), ...).
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1221 | Words for numbers in a language with bijective numeration
Bijective base-k numeration (or k-adic numeration) is a system of writing numerals such that the digits are 1 through k. Thus counting in bijective base-12 (such as my conlang Atili has) works as follows, using X, E, and T for ten, eleven, and twelve, respectively:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, E, T,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1X, 1E, 1T,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2X, 2E, 2T,
...
What are reasonable ways to assign names to these numbers, specifically combining tens? Obviously, I could just name the numbers the way English does and just have the names for numbers not line up with how they are written (so "a dozen" would be T, but "a dozen and one" 11), but are there other solutions for naming that better align with the way that numbers are written?
Just have two different words, like "twelve" (T) and "dozen". Than the number 1T is one-dozen-and-twelve.
Well, that was pretty obvious. I feel kinda silly now.
Well. it is only obvious when one's native language already has the two words "twelve" and "dozen" available. Thinking of bijective base-16, there are no such obvious words available.
The solution I've gone with is to use two different words as jk suggests in his answer. In speech, both "one-dozen and twelve" ("rurinye-tendi") and "two dozen" ("barinye") are acceptable, but have slightly different meanings. Rurinye-tendi means exactly 24, while barinye means at least 24, but not more than 36. The latter is frequently used for approximations and estimations. In writing, rurinye-tendi can be either written as 1T or fully spelled-out, but barinye must be spelled out because there is no way to write it with numerals.
if the base system is deeply ingrained in the language (in most (all?) natlangs it isn't, numbers predate modern positional notation by millennia; let's say your language had the notation for a long long time and historical language changes made the language conform to the notation), then the most natural system is just to read the digits - T is dozen, 11 is one-one.
or make the base multiplier obligatory for numbers bigger than the base - T is dozen but 11 is one dozen (and) one
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1951 | Where synthetic languages "inflect," what is the verb for what analytic languages do?
When I indicate noun properties morphologically, I am "inflecting." When I indicate them with separate words:
fish
this fish
these fish
from these fish
I am not "inflecting." Is there a similar verb for what more analytical languages do?
Further, to describe this activity accurately, does it matter whether the separate word is itself inflected? e.g., "I inflect this->these to [insert requested verb] both proximal and plural"?
The use of function words to do what might otherwise be achieved via inflection is called periphrasis. The adjectival form is periphrastic (as in periphrastic future tense). I don't think there's a verb.
Thanks very much! My language uses connect the verb with the function word(s) periphrastically, then inflection to combine multiple function words.
Wiktionary (sourcing Webster's) indicates a verb to periphrase meaning 1. (transitive) to express by periphrase or circumlocution or 2. (intransitive) to use circumlocution,” besides a noun periphrase which is an alternate form of periphrasis.
Verbum Nullum
For the examples given, I would argue that none of those are inflexion per se, except "from". As you note, English does have morphological inflection, but not all grammatical relationships are shown with inflexion.
I would say that "these" simply modifies "fish"; but also that I do not think "modify" is being set up as a "non-inflexional synonym". It modifies the totality of all individual fish by specifying a particular non-singular subset of fish that happen to be in close proximity to the speaker. We can contrast with "those fish" which specifies a particular non-singular subset of fish that happen to be somewhat distant from the speaker. Similarly, we can modify "fish" in other ways by size, by colour, by type, by sex, by gender, etc. So, inflexion is a kind of modification, but not all modifications are inflective.
I would also argue that English does have extramorphological inflexion. For example, we have a rich verbal system, that inflects (morphologically) for basically one person, sometimes for number and sometimes for mood. We also have a somewhat complex system of modal and auxiliary mediated inflexion.
For example:
I mought could see to that.
If she had only would've done this...
She done gone spoilt the milk.
Your dialect may vary, but I would argue that these modals do in fact count as inflexion for English as much as any Latin synthetic inflexion. Long story short: English has (at least) two kinds of inflexion.
Thank you for the clarifying information. I'm seeking this term because I am writing a grammar for a conlang. I hadn't intended to make my question about English, although I can see I opened that interpretation by using examples from English. I'll edit the question to make it less ambiguous.
On a second look, maybe I'm making a mistake expecting some esoteric technical counterpart to 'inflecting.' Maybe, as well as describing the English situation, 'modifies' is the answer to the title question for linguistics in general.
Are "inflection" and "inflexion" intended to mean something different here?
Edit 2023-08-26: I think this answer is wrong and is superseded by this one.
As far as I know, there isn't a dedicated word for adding more words to express grammatical meaning.
I propose exflect(ion) by analogy with inflect(ion) to fill this gap.
Sounds reasonable to me. I second the proposal. Thanks for the input!
@Vir there's a real word for this periphrasis.
@GregNisbet Rather than rewriting this answer, I'd recommend posting "periphrasis" as a new one, so it can be voted up separately and notifies the OP.
@Draconis It is done. Please leave your comment here because it makes the fact that I have two answers make more sense.
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1059 | Sona: how complete it is and how alive it is?
I find the basic ideas of Sona very appealing, but, from what I see in the web, it is not, by far, as popular as Esperanto or Lojban or other well-known conlangs. Therefore my question: Is it a complete language with a community of fluent speakers, translations of literary works available..? Or is it basically dead?
I think it's pretty much dead.
There is~was a Yahoo group. It has 80 members and no recent activity. But Yahoo groups are all screwed up now, so it's difficult to tell.
There is a dead Sona forum with 14 members. There are a couple translations. No activity since 2010.
There is a dead Sona twitter feed with 13 members. No activity since 2013.
There is a dead Sona tutorial website archived by the Wayback Machine. Not reachable by ordinary means.
The grammar book was hosted online in a now defunct location archived by Wayback Machine.
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983 | Valyrian - what living languages does it resemble the most?
I'm interested in knowing what living languages Valyrian from Game of Thrones resembles the most in its grammar and/or vocabulary.
I've gathered here some very basic examples of what kind of similarities I would like to know of:
History/Culture
To the layman the history of the language group seems to resemble that or latin (and maybe arabic).
Vocabulary
If I have understood correctly the Valyrian vocabulary is formed so that it shouldn't sound like any living language so probably there's not much similarities there.
Grammar
It seems to contain many word inflections which would mean it bears more similarity to Latin than for example English, right?
It has four grammatical genders and here the Wikipedia article mentions some kind of similarity to Bantu languages?
Any other aspects of Valyrian containing significant similarities?
I'm aware that David J. Peterson, the creator of the language for the series didn't base Valyrian on any existing language. Yet it does seem to resemble in many aspects some languages much more (Latin, also Lithuanian comes to mind) than others (Chinese). It might not be a complete language but it has hundreds of words and what seems to be a well-thought-out grammar (see the Wikipedia article) so it should be possible to compare linguistic similarities.
@TorstenLink What does it matter if George Martin or someone else created the language, though? This isn't a GRRM question.
I think this query is going to be far too opinion based to be anything like useful for this forum. For what it worths, a quick shufty reminds me most of Latvian. Google translate wants to translate from Latvian as well. tā kā darba ņēmēju brīva kustība ir pozitīvs sociāli ekonomiskais piemērs gan ES, menti ossēnātās, qilōni pilos lue vale tolvie ossēnātās, yn riñe dōre ōdrikātās. Dovaogēdys! Āeksia ossēnātās, ekonomiskās attīstības, sociālās kohēzijas, individuālo glaesot iderēptot daor.
@elemtilas By using tools like WALS I think a set of languages that Valyrian is closest to typologically could be identified.
@curiousdannii -- Could be. Penny to a pound says WALS will say Latvian as well! Still rather opinion based. That, after all, would just be the opinion of whoever plugged data into WALS!
@elemtilas The language detection algorithms are quite sensitive to the character sets and other superficial features of the spelling system, I doubt that trying automatic language detection on Valyrian gives really sensible results.
It is probably impossible to say which language resembles Valyrian most, lacking a metric for similarity. But there are clearly identifyable influences of other languages, both constructed and natural.
Let's start with the catch phrase valar morghulis from GRRM: It just sounds like Tolkien's Elvish languages, with valar being a word from Quenya and morghul a word from Sindarin. Both Quenya and Sindarin have well-known influences from natural languages: Finnish for Quenya and Welsh for Sindarin.
Looking at High Valyrian, some Finnish feeling is still retained in the language: There is a distinction between long and short consonants as well as vowels, the case endings still have some Finnish feel (and a Latin feel, too, especially the vowel alternations), the phonotactics resemble Finnish. It is further away from Finnish than Quenya in its phonology contrasting voiced and voiceless stops and featuring the sound /q/. There is little Welsh in High Valyrian left, maybe the frequency of "the defining fantasy vowel" ae (Laura Wattenberg) can be traced to Welsh.
The 8-case system may be insprired by Languages like Russian or Sanskrit, with the commitative case being typologically rare, but occurring in Finnish again.
The four noun classes are a creative invention (but not far of, as natural language, especially Native American languages, are concerned) and I see no closer resemblence to Bantu languages (they have a lot of noun classes, but the noun classes are marked by overt prefixes that are also used as agreement markers).
The syntax with head-final relative clauses may be inspired by languages like Japanese.
P.S. While Peterson has stated some linguistic influences for the Dothraki language, I have not found a similar quote for Valyrian. So all the observations above are mine.
This was about the kind of answer I was looking for so I'll mark this as the answer in a couple of days (provided no other answers come up). I don't know if you could already deduce it from my name but I am Finnish so reading this answer certainly brought a smile to my face!
@SimoKivistö: Out of curiousity: Does High Valyrian looks somewhat Finnish to you?
jknappen not at all :). To me it looks more like Latvian or Lithuanian (languages not really related to Finnish). Then again it's hard to recognize similarities in grammar or structure just from written or spoken language as I haven't actually learned any Valyrian.
Russian has 6 cases. I know it as a native speaker of Russian.
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954 | Creating Fictional Slavic Place Names
I have a very simple question regarding a small problem I cannot find a single satisfying answer to. I am trying to create a country with a prominent Slavic culture. In my story, an alien world has been colonized by the nations of Earth. Respectively, each name their lands and territories how they see fit and in their own language. As for this country, it was colonized by the Slavic nations and is rightly given a Slavic sounding name. In fact, the entire continent it exists on shares the same name.
Now, my problem rests in the fact that I'm American and know little Russian except simple greetings. I want to create a genuine sounding Slavic name for the land but do not know where to start. Honestly, I do not understand the Slavic tongues' structures and vocabularies. I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this question so I'll be blunt. Simply, I want to know how to create a genuine sounding Slavic place name. Particularly, I want a name that describes the land itself (just as Belarus means "White Russia") or named after an important figure (just like how the U.S. state Pennsylvania is named after William Penn).
I hope you'll name a town Strugatsk.
And add Zamyatingrad somewhere.
Unfortunately, the English Wikipedia does not have an article on Slavic toponymy yet, the best attempt I am able to find is Bulgarian placename etymology giving at least some hints. You can find interesting Slavic roots to play with in the article on Slavic given names.
Additionally, there are some Slavic based conlangs out there, you can honour one of them by employing it in your fictional world, to drop just names Slovio, Interslavic, see also Pan-Slavic language for an overview.
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1127 | Has the Asshai'i language ever been created?
I heard that David Peterson thought about creating the Asshai'i language.
Did that ever happen? Has the Asshai'i language ever been actually created?
All information I could find on this was that there has been a sketch, but no full-blown description of it.
Probably better to ask if any resources on it were ever published.
As the linked post says, DJP did create a sketch, but it was never used in the show, and he would like to note release any information about his sketch.
As neither Asshai nor the Asshai'i (other than Melisandre, who is only ever shown speaking Westerosi or Valyrian) have appeared in speaking roles in the seasons of Game of Thrones released since DJP answered that question in 2014, or in House of the Dragon there is no reason to believe it was ever further developed or released more widely.
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1902 | Asian and African auxlangs like Interslavic?
What are examples of African and Asian auxlangs like Interslavic?
This answer to another question gives a link to a Central Semitic zonal conlang (as far as I know, never marketed as an auxlang): https://conlang.stackexchange.com/a/1016/142
Arabic comes close for North Africa, and Swahili comes similarly close for the EAC countries. Most lingua francas (which is what auxlangs try to be) are natural languages though. The concept of a constructed language being used as an auxlang is a relatively recent thing.
The simple answer is Asian languages don't share a common ancestor like Slavic languages do, and don't have the same degree of mutual intelligibility. Knowing Ukrainian will help you understand Polish; knowing Korean won't help you understand Vietnamese in the same way.
Many African languages do share a common ancestor (they're part of the Bantu family) but they've also diversified much more than the Slavic languages have since that era. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's tried to create a pan-Bantu conlang, but it's also not surprising if they haven't. It's a much harder task than making Interslavic.
There is the case of Union Ibo, a version of Igbo created by missionaries and used in the Igbo Bible translation. It is a rather inconsistent make-up of different Igbo dialects/languages of Nigeria and it is termed an Igbo Esperanto, for a reference see e.g., this paper Ben Filford (2002). An Igbo Esperanto: A history of the Union Ibo Bible 1900-1950.
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2035 | To make a conlang indeciphrable
How to make a language/code indecipherable or very hard to decipher/learn? What are the key points? How does linguists decipher languages?
Your question is very broad and needs narrowing to a smaller topic. Note that this site has constructed languages as its topic, for cryptographic codes there is [cryptography.se].
See also https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/479/142
Languages are governed by certain laws/principles, that reflect the relationships between elements. For example, element frequency: you generally have a few elements which are very common, and a long tail of rare events.
To make a language hard to learn, break those rules. Make each word/phoneme/letter equally frequent. Common words are short and have several meanings, long words are rare and generally have fewer meanings (as they are more specific). Turn that the other way round. Make long words frequent and unspecific.
Early codes where cracked with frequency tables, ie the letters "e" and "t" being the most common symbols, so substitution ciphers were easily solved. Mix up the spelling of your words to make them semi-random (maybe add some random letters in the middle that are ignored).
The language you will end up with this way will be pretty unusable, and very hard to learn.
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2056 | What are L, S, and F phonemes?
On the Procgenesis language generator, you find these five Phoneme types: C,V,L,S,& F. I believe that C and V are Consonants and Vowels respectively, but nothing I look at can explain the rest. The link is here: http://procgenesis.com/LanguageGen/langgen.html
From a bit of experimentation, it seems:
L is liquids: consonants that can appear after a C in an onset.
S is starts: consonants that can appear before a C in an onset.
F is finals: consonants that can appear in a syllable coda.
@Arfrever That would make a good answer of its own!
You know, I just noticed. "SCL" is a valid onset cluster in English
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2098 | What made Tolkien's diachronics purposefully not naturalistic?
Somewhere else I heard that Tolkien's languages had some purposeful non naturalistic diachronics with stuff like elvish languages having the elves make some purposeful changes to them partially due to their longer lifespans.
I want to try and mimic that kind of thing with my conlang spoken by a small collection of gods but I don't really know what I could/should do differently to get that effect.
Edit: I saw another question about Tolkien's diachronics here but I didn't see any mentions about which of those wouldn't have normally occurred.
I'm not sure if I understand the question. To my knowledge, Tolkien's Elvish languages appear to have changed the way natural languages do through out the fictional history, regardless of whether the Elves made the changes purposefully.
And the sound changes in his Elvish languages are quite normal in real world languages, that Tolkien even listed the real world inspirations of each while putting up his comparative tables, quote: "Telerin is of an approximately Latin type but with labialization of qu > p ... Danian has in general a Germanic type ... Ossir[iandic] has approx[imately] Old English type, East Danian Old Norse, Taliska Gothic ..."(Parma Eldalamberon 19)
Tolkien discussed "why did Elvish language change" in Dangweth Pengoloð ("the Answer of Pengolodh" to said question).
Both Men and Elves willfully change their speech during their lifetime:
when the union of the thought and the sound is fallen into old custom, and the two are no longer perceived apart, then already the word is dying and joyless, the sound awaiting some new thought, and the thought eager for some new-patterned raiment of sound.
But to the changefulness of Eä, to weariness of the unchanged, to the renewing of the union: to these three, which are one. the Eldar also are subject in their degree.
The Elves make innovations and popularize them consciously.
though many be the patterns and devices so made that prove in the end only pleasing to a few, or to one alone, many others are welcomed and pass swiftly from mouth to mouth, with laughter or delight or with solemn thought ... For to the Eldar the making of speech is the oldest of the arts and the most beloved
And the changes they introduce are not "at haphazard".
none among the Eldar would change the sounds of some one word alone, but would rather change some one sound throughout the structure of his speech
Therefore
... albeit more wittingly, albeit more slowly, the tongues of the Quendi change in a manner like to the changes of mortal tongues ...
Tolkien also came up with a quite unconvincing excuse as to why the Eldar don't remember their languages of old, but that's another topic.
For we have much lore concerning the languages of old, whether stored in the mind or in writings; but we hear not ourselves speak again in the past save with the language that clothes our thought in the present.
The Shibboleth of Fëanor details the history of a conscious change or merger (θ > s).
It was attacked by the loremasters, who pointed out that the damage this merging would do in confusing stems and their derivatives.
But then Fëanor made it political and almost everybody hated him so s prevailed in the end.
As you can see (θ > s) is nothing abnormal, the difference may be that the Elves were (more) witting of the change.
There's an interesting note following the Dangweth I just found while researching into this.
The Eldar had an instinctive grasp of the structure and sound-system of their speech as a whole, and this was increased by instruction; for in a sense all Eldarin languages were ‘invented’ languages, art-forms, not only inherited but also material engaging the active interest of their users and challenging awarely their own taste and inventiveness. This aspect was evidently still prominent in Valinor; though in Middle earth it had waned, and the development of Sindarin had become, long before the arrival of the Noldorin exiles, mainly the product of unheeded change like the tongues of Men.
That the Elves (specially the Noldor) made purposeful changes to their language is mainly an in-world statement in Tolkien's work. I don't see much unnaturalness in the sound shifts of the different Elvish languages, they all feel rather natural and not even rare or unusual. A strange aspect may be the rate of language change given the enormous lifespan of the Elves. The Elvish languages change at a pace that would be rather normal for human languages transmitted over many generations.
One may also wonder about the noun inflection in Quenya with its ten cases. There is no described way how it came into being and it is also not declared to be just the starting point of Elvish language evolution.
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2193 | Could a European language include dental clicks?
I’m developing a fictional European language and am considering incorporating a range of phonetic elements that are not typically found in European languages. One feature I’m curious about is the inclusion of a dental click. Given the historical and phonological context of European languages, would it be plausible to have a language with this sound, or would it be too unusual or out of place?
There's no objective way of scoring answers to this question, it comes down to individual opinion, or rather, the OP's opinion. All anyone could say is that it's 'unlikely but not impossible'.
I've asked a Mod to export this question to Constructed Languages.
It's unlikely, but possible.
The thing with clicks is…we don't know where they come from. At all. We only see them in one specific part of the world, and we don't know how they ended up there. We don't know of any sound changes that would make clicks appear where there weren't any before.
But we do know that clicks can fairly easily spread from one language to another via contact. Various Bantu languages have acquired them from contact with Khoisan, and it's possible (even likely!) that the Khoisan languages aren't a cohesive family historically, and are just grouped together because clicks have spread between them in this way.
So there's one explanation that seems very plausible to me: this language had contact with Bantu or Khoisan languages for a good while, and picked up clicks from them. Perhaps it was a colonial language where the African dialect became more prestigious and ended up having an impact on the original European variant.
You could also say it developed clicks through the same unknown mechanism that happened in Khoisan, whatever that may be, but then there's the question of why those clicks haven't spread across Europe (where there's been a lot of contact between nearby languages since prehistory).
Finally, a little note: there's no language ever documented that has a dental click in it. If you have one dental click, you usually have at least five. Nobody is quite sure why this is the case, but click consonants tend to come in groups; it's entirely possible to have a language with just one or two nasals, stops, or fricatives, but not just one or two clicks.
If you don't want to add tons of clicks to your consonant inventory, though—it is extremely plausible and realistic to only have one or two clicks, if they're not used as phonemes. We see this in English, where a dental click (usually transcribed "tut" or "tsk") is used to indicate disapproval; in Greek, a dental click indicates "no", sort of like the /'ṇ.ʔṇ/ ("uh-uh") in English.
This is called "paralinguistic" use, and it's common to have sounds used paralinguistically that aren't actual standard phonemes.
The reason why I chose dental clicks is because it is the only one I could produce myself
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2231 | How could a base-8 system form naturally in a naturalistic conlang?
Counting base systems in languages usually come from how the culture in question counts using their fingers, like the base-10 with all the fingers counted (1x5x2) or the base-12 where you count the phalanges of your first four fingers (3x4). For base-eight, I've been thinking of a system where you exclude your thumb (maybe as a counting rod-kinda way), but that seems cheap. Any potential ways this could be?
Well, excluding the thumb would be cheap, but natural. Maybe, in your conlang the word for "finger" means only the four fingers excluding the thump. So your people have eight fingers and two thumbs. Maybe they count by using the thumb as an index to the fingers.
EDIT: I just learned that in some Native American languages, e.g., Yuki and Pame, the spaces between the fingers are counted, leading natuarally to a base-8 numeral system.
Pacific islanders count by body parts (usually there more than eight). A simple system with eight elements can go left fingertips—left hand—left elbow—left shoulder—right shoulder—right elbow—right hand—right fingertips. The number words in such a system correspond to the names of the body parts.
There are probably more possible explanations.
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1327 | good naturalistic system for Germanic language?
I hope this isn't too redundant of a question...
I was hoping somebody could briefly summarize what general features languages descended from proto-Germanic tend to have? I understand all the relevant terms, but I cannot work my way through grammar breakdowns because I have unmedicated ADHD, so it all blends together :(
I'm really stuck and I would REALLY appreciate if some kind person could lay out some key features of either Germanic languages in general or protogermanic specifically.. like a brief bullet point list?
A long time ago, I was involved in a project named Folkspraak to create a Germanic conlang. It was entertaining, but it did not went very far at that attempt.
Some grammatical hallmarks of Germanic languages are:
A very simple tense system, present and past only, all other tenses are periphrastic and later acquisitions
A past participle as third principal part of the verb
Weak verbs ("regular" verbs) and strong verbs (looking irregular, but in fact they are regular, too, falling into several classes of strong verbs)
Related pairs of strong and weak verbs like fall/fell where the weak verb is a causative of the strong one one (to make fall). More examples for this relation from German trinken (strong verb, "to drink")/tränken (weak verb, "to water (animals)"); springen (strong verb, "to jump, to leap")/sprengen (weak verb, "to explode; to water (lawn); to gallop"). A notorious one is erschrecken (strong verb; "to get frightened, to startle)/erschrecken (weak verb; "to startle so., to frighten")—notorious because the infinitive and some other form coincide and there is some confusion and a tendency to use sich erschrecken (weak verb) instead of the original strong verb in Modern colloquial German.
Modal verbs that are special (preterite-present)
For nouns there is less common ground for the Germanic languages, while German retained four cases and three genders for nouns, those features are partially or completely lost in some other Germanic languages. You can do whatever you want (strive for simplicity or keep a more complicated system at your wish). Same for adjectives.
I’d include V2 word order as another distinctive Germanic feature. However I’d dispute a ‘very simple tense system’ as one: even disregarding the fact that tense is difficult to separate from aspect and mood in most IE languages, a three-tense system of inflectional past and present with periphrastic future is still fairly common crosslinguistically.
could you elaborate on the strong/weak pairs, if that's not a problem? i thought i understood until the fall/fell example, which kind of confused me.
I mean fell as in to fell a tree. The example is not really good, because fell ist also the past tense of to fall, I will add some examples from German to my answer.
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188 | Which constructed language is most actively being developed?
This question shows Esperanto to likely be the largest conlang at the moment, but does not really indicate if the body of literature, number of speakers etc. is actually growing or stale. Are there any statistics to show the relative growth and popularity of different constructed languages?
I thought Wikipedia could be useful and found some ways to access raw data there, but that is probably not very representative.
Edit: To clarify, I would think growth could be defined as:
Expanding body of literature
Increasing number of speakers
It's unclear what you're asking. What do you mean by "most actively developed"? What do you mean by "growth" or "popularity"?
How about the one I just created? Its lexicon has been continually expanding at a rate of 100% every minute
@Darkgamma Edited to clarify. Hope that helps
I think this is too broad unless you restrict it somehow. The great majority of conlangs are not published--for example, I have a couple that nobody else has ever seen whose body of literature may be expanding. If I teach my sister my new secret language, the body of speakers doubles in just a day.
@CHEESE Growth does not need to be a percentage. If you start at 1 and add 1, you grow at 100%. If you start at 10 and add 2, you grow at 20%, but 2 is still more "growth" than 1
@neelsg If a language with 1000 speakers gains 50, it has more growth than if a language with 2000 adds 50. You said yourself that it wasn't based on size in your first sentence.
@CHEESE I would only be interested in body of literature that is public. As I explained earlier, if you teach your sister a new language, the number of speakers may have doubled, but it also only increased by one, so not really significant
The problem with this type of question is it does not contain a specific problem statement — what "problem" you are trying to solve specifically? The question appears ambiguous (or too broad) because users can only guess how to help you specifically. An overly broad premise becomes either a prelude to an ongoing discussion (not supported by this platform) or users start answering randomly so you can pick through the answers later (not how this site is supposed to work). Either way, this question is not currently answerable in the context of this type of Q&A.
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512 | Brahmic conscript with European style
The scripts of South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent), e.g. Devanagari, and Southeast Asia, e.g. Thai, are almost all derived from the Brahmic script. They show gradual visual relationships and most of them are structurally similar. They are syllabaries with non-default vowels being denoted by diacritics and consonant clusters often forming complex ligatures.
Is there any constructed variant of this family of scripts that intentionally uses shapes found in the major European scripts (Roman, Cyrillic and Greek)? Preferably, it would be based upon the stems and loops of lowercase Roman letters. I think it’s impossible to achieve in a readable way, but maybe there is even a mimicry or "faux Latin" font for one of the existing scripts (e.g. Burmese or Malayalam) that would qualify.
PS: I have attached some roman letters in red to similar looking glyphs in the picture below. The imagined conscript would have a consistent set of letters and diacritics that looked much like roman ones.
Can you explain more what you mean? A Brahmic inspired script which has borrowed forms from the Latin script? Latin consonants used as an abugida with diacritics instead of the Lain vowels?
The former. A Brahmic script that strongly reminds one of the Roman script. If it was built closely matching the Malayalam script, for instance, the letters ട ധ ന would look (almost) the same as s w m.
Font designer's already have done this, seee e.g. Samarkan on this page: https://www.free-fonts.com/search?q=Devanagari%20Script%20Style
@jknappen Samarkan is a Roman faux Devanagari font. I rather mean a Brahmic faux Roman font.
Can you create a picture of a hypothetical example of the sort of thing you mean?
Oh, you're actually after a font, not a script?
No, I’m not really looking for a font, but since the South-Asian scripts are so closely related, one could make a faux Roman font at least for some of them.
You've really gotta explain what you want more clearly. Font requests aren't on topic here, so if that's not what you really want, please explain better.
@JeffZeitlin I have now added an image that hopefully makes it a bit clearer. As you can see, none of the related scripts can easily be faked with roman letters, hence a simple mimicry font will not do, a complete conscript is required.
I'm assuming that your intent with the image is to reproduce the same set of syllables in all of the listed scripts, and the syllables reproduced are those in the Latin script at the top? If so, then any result that meets your vague criteria will be completely arbitrary, and likely not significantly different in appearance from either an abugida built from IPA or the 'standard' Latin transcription at the top of your image - except that it won't be any more readable to me than text written with the Samarkan font is to someone who only reads Devanagari.
The image is from Wikipedia and all phrases are transliterations of each other. I just added the parts in red. The glyph shapes are not derived arbitrarily from their ancestors and neither should be those of the conscript.
http://www.themicrofoundry.com/other/thai.gif is close to what I mean, using Thai
yikes
I have seen examples of a Thai typeface with a very roman look (more so than @Crissov's last example).
Franabugida by François Boullion, though developed for writing French, is a faux roman script with abugida features that fulfills the criteria pretty well, although some of the resulting shapes look quite foreign.
Akkhara Muni by Ian James comes close to being a roman-looking script with Brahmic abugida structure, although it lacks complex ligatures and (non-inherent) vowels are not diacritic-like.
The historic (but unused) Ariyaka script for writing Pali from 19th-century Siam/Thailand is also obviously inspired by Latin and Greek letter forms and the Brahmic system.
BLUIS by Punya Pranava Pasumarty does not meet the criteria, but due to its design, it could be used as a base: One would just need to make the letter forms more roman-looking.
If this is what you're after, then my original question was pretty might right, even though you said it wasn't? "Latin consonants used as an abugida with diacritics instead of the Latin vowels"
Except that the Latin letters should not be used for their usual phonological value, but for visual similarity to letters of existing Brahmic scripts.
Next project: Pama-Nyungan inspired vocabulary, but using English words
Simultaneously beautiful and horrific!
I see how my question could be misunderstood in this way. I’m looking for a script whose looks fit well with the Roman script, not for an abugida build with IPA symbols.
@Crissov: IPA is the Latin script (or a specialised adaptation of it, anyway). Does replacing as4s4hetic's glyphs with plain alphabetic letters (like a for æ) meet your expectations?
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2170 | With infix connectives, how to handle edge cases?
Suppose we have a language containing an infix connective for building some sort of sequence. For example, perhaps our terminals are natural numbers and commas, and we are considering fragments like "0,1" or "2,3,5". How might we express a sequence of zero or one item?
In the abstract, it's kind of an easy question, so let's use a real grammar. In Lojban, {ce'o} builds a sequence. Instead of "0,1" we might say {li no ce'o li pa}. However, when we want to indicate that a sequence has zero items or one item, there is no (baseline) syntax for it. A similar issue arises for {ce}, which builds an unordered set. How can we work around or fix this deficit?
I'm not quite seeing how this is an infix: it's a separate word, no?
@Draconis It's an infix the way "+" is an infix in "3+2". The mathematical sense, not the linguistic one
Well, natural languages usually don't have much need to distinguish between "the object X" and "the sequence containing only the object X", so there's not a lot of precedent there to work with. We'll have to look elsewhere for inspiration.
In Python, a multi-element tuple is A, B, C, a one-element tuple is A,, and a zero-element tuple is (). So that's one way to do it: have a multi-element sequence be A conj B conj C, a one-element sequence be A conj, and a zero-element sequence be null (a separate marker of some sort).
In Lisp (and various languages inspired by it), there are exactly two types of lists: nil, and X . rest, where X is an element and rest is a list. A three-element list would be A . B . C . nil. So this gives us another way to do it: have a multi-element sequence be A conj B conj C conj end, a one-element sequence be A conj end, and a zero-element sequence be end. (Parentheses omitted for simplicity.)
I was hoping for answers that don't modify the grammar, but this is still a good overview for language designers that have the luxury of fixing mistakes. Here's a motivating question: how does Python represent a singleton tuple containing a singleton tuple?
@Corbin Well, you need parentheses any time you're nesting sequences, no?
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565 | Is a naturalistic language without countable nouns possible?
Is a naturalistic language without count nouns possible, thus having only mass nouns? This would mean having many words for things with water: a sea, an ocean, a bottle of water, a puddle, etc.
What about compounding to get these words?
The obvious answer is yes. You could even have a language with no nouns. Of course you might not be able to describe anything, which might make the language not very useful. I suspect this is not what you want, in that case you need to elaborate a few more requirements for the language, to exclude the trivial solutions. Also, by countable do you mean finite or countably infinite?
Or do you mean a language without count nouns (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_noun) but with mass nouns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun)?
Yes. I'll clarify it @Jetpack
As a matter of fact, Mandarin Chinese can be considered to be such a language - it treats every noun as a mass noun. Every noun requires a "measure word" for counting, like "bottle" in "four bottles of water" or "sheet" in "ten sheets of paper". Chinese has a considerable list of these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers) but there's no particular reason that a language with only mass nouns would need to have so many classifiers.
Actually Chinese does have specifically noncount nouns just like English, and they do interact differently with classifiers. Indeed, they cannot be used directly with a number+classifier at all: you can't count "five muds" in Chinese any more than you can in English. That's discussed in the Wikipedia article on classifiers and also here.
Yes. A language can treat all nouns as mass nouns and require classifiers when counting objects.
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568 | What are reasons to construct an auxlang, artlang, altlang, etc?
What are reasons to construct a language? Why do people construct languages? For example, auxlangs are created for global (or regional) 'compatibility'. Why do people construct artlangs, altlangs, englangs, auxlangs and philangs?
This appears to be primarily opinion-based in its potential answers.
What way? An auxlang is by definition auxiliary, an artlang is by definition for art, etc.
It's not any more opinion based than many questions here
What do you mean by "certain types" of conlangs?
As in the title, auxlang, artlang, altlang etc
@DuncanWhyte These are most excellent glossopoetry oriented questions, but it really isn't the question type that SE is designed to handle. Your question is opinion based because, basically, you're asking for individual opinions. (Why questions almost always invite opinionated answers.) Your question is too broad because there is nothing like a right answer or even any fewer than 6433 right answers! TBC...
@DuncanWhyte This is the kind of question we love to answer on broad scope language invention forums (CBB; Conlang-L; Reddit and the like.) This Stack Excahnge forum is for glossopoets to ask simple, to the point, questions about invented languages and receive to the point, factual and non-opinion based answers. Avoid subjective questions here!
I cannot speak for any other language creator, but I have done so as part of "worldbuilding" - for an alien world to have alien languages adds verisimilitude, and even if the language isn't actually heavily used, knowing how the language works and having a partial vocabulary lets me insert words from that language where there is no exact translation in English, or where the English would be a long circumlocution. As an example, one language I worked up has a word that means, literally, "a change in lighting that reveals new detail", but whose use has been extended to the metaphorical equivalent - and in one discussion in the associated story, after one character explained something to another, the second thanked the first - "That was a very useful kurìshdàm; thank you."
See my revised question
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420 | What notation do constructed sign languages use?
What notation do constructed sign languages use?
Many well-known big sign languages (such as ASL) have their own form of notation, but that notation is very specific and may not be able to express a sign in other sign languages. For example, ASL school is
OpenB@Palm-PalmDown-OpenB@CenterChesthigh-PalmUp Contact Contact
but some constructed sign language X might require signals that don't appear in ASL, like 'touch your elbow with the thumb of your non-dominant hand'. The notation could be extended but would be complicating it. Language X thus requires its own system for its own signs or an 'international' one in analogy with the International Phonetic Alphabet.
What are the notations commonly used by constructed sign languages?
Which sign languages use them?
I'm not aware of any existing Sign conlangs which use SignWriting, but it does look far more intuitive than SLIPA.
Hmm... looking into it.
On the SLIPA page, SignWriting is discussed and it has some significant drawbacks.
This concept is not in general use among the broader conlanging community, but the basics of the system I use for notating my own con-sign-language are described at http://gliese1337.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-system-for-coding-handshapes.html
@Adarain. SignWriting is now (partially) supported in Unicode.
The best I've found, for linguistic purposes, is HamNoSys ("Hamburg Notation System", Hanke (2004)). It works like IPA: it is more an instruction-notation than observation-notation. For example; IPA allows glottal stop [ʔ] together with (i.e.) palatal, dental, alveolar and labial fricatives, but these are indistinguishable. Another example: [m͡n] (depending on notation, I'll use x͡y is simultaneously x and y) is [m] + [n] but sounds like plain [n].
This concept continues on in HamNoSys: see this chart, where overlapping segments are indistinguishable but technically doable and thus notatable. According to Millar (2001), it is the most used notation, alongside Stokoe and derivatives.
Also, HamNoSys has programs that convert HamNoSys into imagery and videos.
Hanke, T. (2004), “HamNoSys - representing sign language data in language resources and language processing contexts.” In: Streiter, Oliver, Vettori, Chiara (eds): LREC 2004, Workshop proceedings : Representation and processing of sign languages. Paris : ELRA, 2004, - pp. 1-6.
Miller, C., 2001. Some reflections on the need for a
common sign notation. Sign Language and Linguistics.
4(1/2):11-28.
I disagree that simultaneous [m] and [n] sound identical to [m] alone. In fact, the Yele language appears to distinguish not only between [m] and [m͡n], but also between a dental and an alveolar variant of the latter phonemically.
While holding them, they sound identical to n. If they don't, [m͡n] is just an approximation. I mean pure synchronic [n] with [m].
There are very few constructed sign languages. On the subreddit, we sometimes get questions about whether anyone has made any, which usually don’t get many replies. This one here has some examples given, and also links a website which has basically the answer to your actual question:
SLIPA is an attempt by David Peterson to fill the lack of sign language transcription systems. However, due to it being ASCII-compliant, it ends up rather unweildy and I’ve never seen it employed in actuality. Nevertheless, the website provides important information that could be useful for you to derive your own system tailored to your language, and to use as a reference for comparing your own notation to.
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412 | Soudwegian: A Swedish-German process similar to what happened to English and French?
The idea is that the Swedes retain a small bit of what is nowadays German territory that they conquered in the 17th century. This is now independent territory, Soudway, with a language of its own named Soudwegian.
Their vocabulary is basically German with a lot of phonetic changes, plus a huge amount of Swedish loans (and smaller but important contributions from Polish and French), while the grammar is very simplified, like Middle/Modern English as opposed to Old English.
Is that a realistic choice, or was the grammatic simplification that characterised the process between English/French unique—not something that we should expect from other similar fusions?
Would downvoters please mind explaining?
There is already a lot of overlap in both vocabulary and grammatical structures; after all, they are both Germanic languages (Swedish is North Germany). You would replace some of the Norse vocabulary by Middle German equivalents. Perfectly plausible.
Seems to me that the German spoken in Soudway would not diverge much from neighboring dialects, unless commerce is cut off. A Swedish-speaking community, on the other hand, would diverge from the home language, but (because of proximity) not as much as Afrikaans did.
You might be aware, and this is an old question, but someone should note that you could argue that (at least some soft version of) the reverse scenario actually took place. The language of Sweden was under heavy influence from Low German in the middle ages, and a fair proportion of the modern Swedish vocabulary can be traced back to Low German and that time. In the same time, much of the grammar of Old Norse, with noun cases, verb forms agreeing with persons and other stuff found in many Indo-European languages, were lost in many dialects during this time.
Yes, that is a realistic choice in fictive works.
Abstractly
Nobody can be 100% sure of how realistic it is, and in conlanging—or even fictive worldbuilding in general—you may always be a bit unrealistic. Think about some fictive works or conlangs you know placed in another world; they make many assumptions that extraterrestrial life has two eyes, hair on their head, ~1m–2m tall, and their mouths have lips, teeth, an alveolar ridge, a glottis and a tongue. (Your idea takes place in our (but alternative) world, but the point of the example still stands.)
Linguistically
There could be many ways of forming such a language, of which the most realistic are (chiefly from Mark Rosenfelder's Advanced Language Construction):
A creole. A creole is, by definition, a pidgin which has native speakers. A pidgin is formed when two languages try to communicate, for reasons of trade or otherwise. If you read about Tok Pisin (etymologically "talk pidgin", a creole), you'll see a lot of simplified grammar (and, as you say, English is already quite simplified).
From Swedish, but developing independently from main Swedish. As a native English speaker born in Holland, informal English I use to talk to my family is very different from main English. For example, I'd say *How late is it? (from Dutch Hoe laat is het?) by accident. Also, lots of sound changes happen. Even though I don't merge /w/ and /ʍ/, many people I know that used to be able to can't anymore, and my rhotic in both Dutch and English is [ʁ], even though neither Dutch nor the Scottish dialect of English has it.
A combination of the two. After a period of isolation (independent development), the Swedes start talking more like the Germans (like creoles, but slightly different)—a combination of the two.
So, even though it might be somewhat unrealistic, within the dome of fiction it isn't unrealistic enough to stop you.
Well, in an alternate history this is a perfectly plausible scenario.
Note that the the German contribution to the language should be Low German corresponding to the local dialects of Pommerania. It is cloaser to Swedish because the second sound shift characterising High German has not affected the Low German dialects. A good dose of loan words from High German can add some spice to Soudwegian.
In the time frame you are looking at, Polish or other Slavonic influence is already very low, don't overdo it.
You may look at languages like Plautdietsch or Afrikaans for more inspiration.
I'm thinking of adding several phonological changes; I'm not sure that this would leave much to recognise from High or Low German. For instance, their main city should be Gustauhau - Gustav's Harbour.
Add Gustauhau to your question, it indicates some directions! The sound shift /av/ to /au/ is not that disturbing, I see the /g/ remains /g/ and /st/ remains /st/ ...
Thanks for the links, though Wikipedia is probably unusable (1,500,000 native High German speakers in Brazil? Where?)
I'm not sure what page you're complaining about exactly, but Brazilian German has all the sources.
And those sources... do not support that absurd figure: they either refer to 1940, or tell us about much lesser numbers (700 or 900 K) of speakers of unspecified "German" - which, of course, is Hunsrückish, never Hochdeutsch. And, of course, many of those sources are in Portuguese, which makes possible to "cite" them to say exactly the opposite of what they actually say.
Speaking of Hunsrückish, the Wikipedia article has it as "Low German", which it is certainly not.
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437 | What tools exist for creating syntactically correct generated text in new languages?
Another way to put this is, what tools exist to generate sentences in the same way that some conlanging tools generate phonotactically valid words.
I've heard people suggest using word generators to generate sentences. I'm open to the idea, but it seems that morphology and syntax aren't close enough and I'm not smart enough to put my finger on why. If there is a word generator that can do sentences, I'd be interested in looking at it.
Here is an example I laboriously wrote for Toki Pona.
Note: I'm well aware there are a bunch of tools for just generating a random sampling of a dictionary, but that doesn't create syntactically valid sentences.
But lorem ipsum doesn’t include syntactically valid sentences?
@jan I mean "machine generated syntactically correct random sentences", not unlike Lorem Ipsum, which happens to be real Latin, use to see if a printer's layout works, but in this case, to see if a hypothetical syntax works.
Rosenfelder was working on one, IIRC
Do you happen to have a formal grammar for the language?
@JohnDvorak I did one for toki pona with agfl -
http://www.suburbandestiny.com/?p=805 and while looking for that, it turns out there is a node lib for generating texts from agfl grammars https://www.npmjs.com/package/agfl-generate
I do not know of any tools that are specifically designed for producing syntactically valid text, but my own word generator Logopoeist could be made to work for that purpose, and it wouldn't be terribly difficult to update it to produce a program actually intended for that purpose.
The reason for this is that Logopoeist already treats morphophonology as an extension of syntax, and generates words according to explicit word-syntax parse trees, rather than, e.g., just filling in slots in a CV-style syllable structure template. So, if you are able to write up a formal grammar of the language's syntax above the word level, and put it into a format that the tool can read, then you just need to replace the phoneme/grapheme lists with word lists instead (repurposing phonetic classes to serve as syntactic classes / parts of speech), and it'll spit out random sentences instead of random words.
It is difficult for a machine to passively understand a language (it takes tons of time with machine learning, and that's for Google). Actively, that's even more difficult, as many machine responses are pre-programmed and rarely actually generated (and in that case, mostly nonsensical, but the question isn't for sensical utterances). It will be extremely difficult and without appropriate backing impossible to make one that learns a new language.
That said, the one like the Toki Pona in your question could be made. But you'd have to program most of it yourself, and in languages like Toki Pona that's easy. Try generating artlangs which more like natlangs.
This doesn't mean it couldn't seem like one. You could:
Extract text (in English or some language) from books or such. You can find enough text online.
Translate it (i.e. Google translate) between many languages, obscuring the information. (optional)
Translate it from English—or better, i.e. Lojban, Esperanto, Toki Pona or raw predicate logic, as they are less complicated and easier to translate from—to your conlang.
Dispose of invalid sentences using some kind of lightweight parser. (optional)
I couldn't find any (good) generators, but you could have the first!
I've done stories and rhyming poems with my own JABBER.EXE, but it is 16 bit (windows XP or earlier). Besides filling out a dictionary (which includes verb affordances and hyponym trees), you have to set 'parameters' for the language, and ConLangs do too much with those parameters. There can be no general purpose ConLang generator unless it learns like a human.
Is your program available for download? Otherwise it won't be much use to anyone else...
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165 | I want to create a family of languages. Should I do one first or should I concentrate on all of them?
I want to create a whole family of related languages like a natural language family, like Semitic, Italic and Germanic languages. In what ways can this be done? What are the requirements, drawbacks and benefits of each?
Method questions like this seem entirely opinion based to me. An acceptable question format would ask the reasons why people choose one particular method over another. (A separate question should be asked for the reverse.)
Not only is this question opinion based, it is very broad.
Yeah, my question. I had not posted it yet because I was thinking on how to make it less opionion-based and less broad. Seems like I made a good call … ^^'
The usual way to approach making a family of related languages is to first make a proto-language (or adopt an existing or reconstructed natural language for this purpose), then simulating natural evolution of both phonology, morphology and semantics in multiple different directions. While the creation of the protolang cannot really be parallellised (though one can deliberately introduce features that one would like to play around with in the following process, or that one can easily see multiple outcomes for), the process of evolving the descendants of the protolanguage can definitely be parallellised, and whether or not to do so is simply a matter of taste (though some things necessarily require some amount of parallel work, such as making a dialect continuum).
There are alternative methods to the derivation-from-protolang method, however they tend to either be much more cumbersome (e.g. trying to reconstruct a protolanguage from two or more seperate conlangs) and/or produce results that do not show the same regularity of correspondence that is indicative of genetic relation in natural languages (e.g. trying to just make two seperate but similar conlangs).
For a naturalistic language family one has to apply naturalistic sound shifts and other naturalistic language changes. Those rules and changes are usually directed, therefore it is the best to design the oldest stage of the language (aka the proto-anguage) first and to apply sound shifts and language changes afterwards.
Designing a whole language familiy requires a lot of historical linguistic background, but it is not impossible, as the family of Elvish languages by Tolkien shows.
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12 | What is opposite of "burzum", "darkness", in Tolkien's Black Speech?
I'm aware that burzum means darkness in The Black Speech.
Do we know what the opposite is? How is lightness written?
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a translation request, which I would like to consider off-scope
Relevant meta discussion.
I don't understand why is this question considered offtopic, since it is searching for a word that is unknown. Tolkien didn't provide much information about black speech, and this answering this question would require searching a lot for the data. And about the tags, a relevant meta discussion
@Adarain There's a currently ongoing meta discussion about questions of this type. At the moment, the highest-voted answer says to allow them.
As @Darkgamma says, we don't know. The closest we have would probably be ghâsh, which means fire, and one could probably guess that the characteristic of being fire-like would be something like ghâshum, but there is no empirical evidence for that, except that the suffix -um seems to mean -ness, as in burz- (meaning dark) + -um (meaning -ness), put together to form burzum.
That said, ghâshum would literally mean "the characteristic of being like fire," not literally "lightness."
In short: no.
In a bit long: not really, and some people have gone to the effort of analysing the Black Speech. In essence, the list of words we know thus far is rather scant:
agh "and"
ash "one"
-at infinitive suffix, or possibly a specialized "intentive" suffix indicating purpose: Ash nazg durbatulûk "one Ring to rule them all"
bagronk (DBS) "cesspool", possibly bag+ronk "cess+pool"
búbhosh (DBS) "great"
búrz "dark", (isolated from Lugbúrz, q.v.), burzum "darkness"
dug "filth", tentatively isolated from pushdug, q.v.
durb- "rule", infinitive durbat, only attested with suffixes:
durbatulûk "to rule them all". The verb durb- is remarkably similar to Quenya tur- of similar sense.
ghâsh "fire" (stated to be derived from the Black Speech, may or may not represent Sauron's original form of the word)
gimb- "find", infinitive gimbat, only attested with a pronominal suffix: gimbatul, "to find them"
glob (DBS) "fool"
gûl "any one of the major invisible servants of Sauron dominated entirely by his will" (A Tolkien Compass p. 172). Translated "wraith(s)" in the compound Nazgûl, "Ringwraith(s)".
hai "folk", in Uruk-hai "Uruk-folk" and Olog-hai "Troll-folk"; cf. also Oghor-hai.
ishi "in", a suffixed postposition: burzum-ishi, "in the darkness".
krimp- "bind", infinitive krimpat, only attested with a pronominal suffix: krimpatul, "to bind them"
lug "tower". Isolated from Lugbúrz, q.v.
Lugbúrz the Dark Tower, Sindarin Barad-dûr (Lug-búrz "Tower-dark")
nazg "ring": ash nazg "one ring", Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)"
Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)", nazg + gûl (q.v.)
Oghor-hai "Drúedain" (UT:379; this may or may not be pure Black Speech)
olog a variety of Troll apparently developed by Sauron. Olog-hai "Olog-people".
pushdug (DBS) "dungfilth", possibly push+dug "dung+filth"
ronk (DBS) "pool", tentatively isolated from bagronk, q.v.
skai (DBS) interjection of contempt
sha (DBS) interjection of contempt
sharkû (DBS?) "old man"
snaga "slave" (May be DBS.) Used of lesser breeds of Orcs (WJ:390).
thrak- "bring", infinitive thrakat, only attested with suffixes: thrakatulûk "to bring them all"
u (DBS) "to"
-ûk "all", suffixed to pronominal suffixes: -ulûk, "them all"
-ul pronominal suffix "them".
-um "-ness" in burzum "darkness".
uruk a great variety of Orc. According to WJ:390, Sauron probably borrowed this word "from the Elvish tongues of earlier times".
The abbreviation DBS stands for Debased Black Speech, a colloquial idiom variety of the Black Speech as used by the orcs and goblins.
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499 | Can Pokemon language encode enough information to be a language?
I know that like Star Wars' droid, Pikachu's language is just nonsense with emotionally appropriate intonation, that said...
Can suprasegmental features (accent, tone, etc) encode a single three syllable word in enough different ways to get the vocabulary up to toki pona size? (about 100-125) Or up to a natural language size lexicion (say 7000-15000)
The question occurred to me because Alexa has a "speak to pikachu" feature where it then pretends to let you converse with Pikachu in Pikachu-ese.
From what I remember from the cartoon, Pikachu could only say certain permutations of its name, with any combination of vowels elongated.
3 syllables pikat͡ʃu 8 words
2 syllables pika 4 words
1 syllables pi 2 words
Pikachu is also capable of producing at least 4 different tones:
Tone IPA Made when
High ˥ Excited
Mid ˧
Rising ˧˥ Curious
Falling ˧˩ Disappointed
So, knowing this, Ash's pikachu should be able to say at least 584 distinct "words", which is well above the toki pona threshold.
Sadly it's pretty much impossible for this system to match the lexicon size of a natural language. Using an 8 tone system and adding primary and secondary stress brings the number of distinct words up to 25104, which is significantly larger than the Esperanto lexicon but still far away from that of a natural language, which is around 200K words.
From here on you could introduce some questionable features like 8 more tones, 7 different vocal registers, or the ability to say different permutations of its name (which is probably not as dodgy but also imagining pikachu say /ka.chu.pi/ makes me extremely uncomfortable).
The best way in my opinion would be to introduce the syllabic thunder shock ⚡, which would require pikachu to release up to three thunder shocks whilst saying a word, all for the good cause of bringing the lexicon size of Pika-ese to a final 198688 words.
(No wonder Meowth learnt how to speak a human language, imagine being stuck with a one-syllable name.)
I would put forward that Meowth is a two syllable word as English doesn't realize "eow" as the triphthong /iaʊ/ but rather with a syllabic break /i.aʊ/. That way, a standard Meowth could at least get away with 72 words (going with the simpler 4 tone and length model).
Pokemon like Jinx would still be stuck with 8 words.
... Why is this such a fascinating topic to try to puzzle out?
Pi-ka-CHUUUU!!!
Couldn't Pikachu designate one sound as a word-ender, one sound as a sentence-ender, and then use combinations of the rest of the sounds to form syllables which form words?
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507 | How can I become a professional conlang designer?
There is some market for constructed languages in film, television, computer games and literature. Some conlangs designs were commissioned to linguists who did the real word.
Is there a possibility to become a professional conlang designer? What prerequisites are needed?
@curiousdannii If you have an answer, please post it in the answer section below. Thanks.
@Robert it was less an answer and more a dismissal of the question.
Well, "no" (with some substantiation) is a valid answer to the primary question.
@curiousdannii That's what I assumed, so at least consider that dismissing a question with a snarky, passive aggressive answer (in a comment, no less) isn't the best way to constructively either help make the question better or explain why it needs to be closed in any form. That's the crux of our "Be Nice" policy — https://conlang.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice
@Robert I wasn't passive aggressive or snarky. Maybe "dismissal" is the wrong word. I don't think it's a great question because as with almost everything in showbiz, it comes down to who you know, and luck. I wrote "dismissal" only because the answer to any question which boils down to "how do you get lucky?" is "luck". But I can't write an answer because I don't know the specific lucky circumstances of any professional conlangers.
I'd recommend broadening this question to asking how to monetize a conlang, lest people fixate on if the money you get will pay your mortgage. People are making money off conlangs, it is hit or miss and not a lot of money.
Here is one way to get lucky, curiousdannii!
@elemtilas what was that for, Avatar?
@Adarain I believe that would be our own David Peterson's work on Shivaisith for Thor: The Dark World, Avatar came out a few years before, and I don't believe Paul Frommer is/was an LCS member (who else is likely to read the Jobs Board!?)
It's not strictly impossible to become a professional conlanger (obviously, since professional conlangers do exist), but it's highly unlikely. There are very, very few conlanging jobs out there, and at this point most who want to hire a conlanger will look for a known entity. Most of the professional conlangers you've heard of got their first conlanging job because they were very, very lucky and got any subsequent conlanging jobs because of their first one. So unless you know a surefire way to increase your luck or you happen to know people who work in showbiz already (nepotism never hurts), your odds of becoming a professional conlanger are not that great.
That said, the Language Creation Society does have a job board where people looking for conlangers to hire can solicit someone -- it's usually empty, but it's really the only good place to look.
As for prerequisites, there really aren't any besides being interested in conlanging (and ideally having done so before) and having the right connections to get someone to actually hire you. A background in linguistics will likely make you better at conlanging, but it's not necessarily going to be required for you to get hired.
The list of ways to make money with a conlang is short, so step one is to be creative.
Write Genre Fiction Books.
Authors do make a living writing and selling books, sometimes with an artificial language bundled with it. Wardesan, Láadan, Tolkien's books are good examples. I'm guessing the conlang part though is reducing their income, they could write more books if they skipped writing a conlang. Personally, I'd buy a book with a conlang if the author tried to make it simple enough to enjoy for 10 to 20 hours. Instead we get unusable languages that require 2000 hours of study to appreciate them, same or worse than a natural language. And I'm an outlier, so I'd imagine regular genre fiction buyers see a bundled language as a low value gimmick.
Communication Systems for the Disabled.
Blissymbols made money, albeit in a rather dishonorable way by suing the institution that was trying to help the profoundly disabled communicate with a symbol board, which was in essence an artificial language. I spoke with a specialist in the more modern versions of these, and often vendors don't even bother to acknowledge that symbol boards are not English, but conlang-like systems with all the challenges.
In the realm of conscripts, there is a commercial writing system for ASL. I'm failing to re-find the link.
Historical BSL was essentially a franchise and BSL was something of a trade secret.
Movies.
Movies have been hiring professional linguists (Klingon, Na'vi) The Klingon dictionary and Avatar handbook sold a lot of copies, but the authors both became professional linguists first, and these books are really side projects.
Selling learning materials.
This has got to be the worst way to monetize a conlang. The artificial language section of any large library has to be littered with books of people who thought they could sell a lot of copies of their grammar summaries, workbooks and dictionaries. No one wants the grammar summary. What they want is to meet their significant other by learning a language which brings me to...
Esperanto
Esperanto actually has economic activity, but the language is already written. Building a language starts with grammar and vocabulary, but to extract money from people, people need to learn it. If your interest in conlang building is in the community building part, then it might make more sense to make a living working with an existing conlang that has attracted a community, complete with conferences, etc. That said, I'm guessing no one is getting rich off of Esperanto, but there are teachers of Esperanto, etc.
Games
There have been reports of people writing full languages for computer games, card games. Magic the Gathering's Phyrexian comes to mind. So far, these have been gimmicks and the amount of money, I'm guessing is not a lot. Some of the game makers don't even bother to publish the grammar and dictionary! This makes it sort of into a laborious game of decipherment.
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1178 | Usage of different plural systems in the same language
Let's assume a language once had an extensive plural system, indicating singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, et cetera. Over time, as has happened in real languages, this was simplified to a simpler singular/plural system except in personal pronouns, which retained the original distinctions. In other words, the language would distinguish only between "woman" (one woman) and "women" (more than one woman), but when you used a pronoun, you'd have "she" (one woman), "she2" (two women"), "she+" (a few women), and "she++" (many women).
Your conversations would thus look like the following:
"That woman came out of the store. She is carrying a bag."
"Those women came out of the store. She2 are carrying bags." (Two women came out)
"Those women came out of the store. She+ are carrying bags." (More than two women came out)
"Those women came out of the store. She++ are carrying bags." (Many women came out)
A similar situation situation would occur with all personal pronouns.
So, the question: while this sort of thing is obviously possible, since I just described it, is this a feature which has been documented in a natural language? I'm not just restricting it the way I've done, but the general situation where the grammar of the language has simplified down the grammatical number, perhaps even to not having a singular/plural distinction at all, except for retaining a more elaborate grammatical number system in one single common grammatical element.
A similar system to the one you describe is attested in Fijian. Fijian has a single-dual-paucal-plural distinction in its pronouns only. However, almost every sentence must contain a subject pronoun. I'm not sure about the status of imperatives in Fijian. Fijian also has VOS word order, where S is a lexical subject.
Independent nouns themselves are not marked for number and the articles that introduce them are also not marked for number.
era la'o [a gone]
3PL go DET child
The children are going
In other examples, a gone is glossed as the child. From this we can infer that the subject pronoun (or part of the verb phrase, depending on how you analyze it), is usually the only place in the clause where number is overtly marked. Pronouns can surface in other positions as well, and pronominal number contrasts are not neutralized when the pronoun isn't the subject.
As an interesting wrinkle, pronouns have a separate form that's used when they are the head of a noun phrase, including a subject noun phrase.
era sa la'o [o ira]
3PL ASP go ART 3PL
"They are going"
But, pronouns can occur after the verb without being introduced by an article or a preposition if they are objects.
o aa biu-ti ira
2SG PAST leave-TR 3PL
"You left them"
More generally, it is somewhat common for pronouns or a subset of the pronouns to have a different number system than independent nouns. Proto-Germanic is reconstructed with dual number in first and second person pronouns and their corresponding verbal forms, but without the dual in the third person or in nouns.
Do all clauses have to contain a subject pronoun, or a subject marker (clitic/prefix, even though it is written as a separate word)? Are there not separate free pronouns as in other Oceanic languages?
That is hard to say. All clauses must contain some kind of marker that references the person and number features of the subject. The independent pronouns have multiple forms in Fijian depending on case. Subject pronouns (which are apparently only used as person markers) appear before the verb, the lexical subject (which might be a phrase headed by a pronoun) appears after the verb.
Put another way, yes there are independent pronouns, but they have separate forms for each of three cases. The subject case in Fijian is only used for pronouns that precede the verb. This raises the question are the subject pronouns just verbal person/number marking?. It's a good question, the WALS feature values for Fijian do not appear to consistently pick one analysis. For instance, Fijian is marked as having head-marked clauses but little inflection.
Also attested in English, just not to the extent of your example.
Dual number existed in nouns & pronouns and was lost in nouns by Primitive Germanic times. Its use continued into West Germanic & Old English first & second person pronouns:
s d pl
1 ic wit we
2 þu yit ye
An example from a different grammatical component, to widen the perspective.
In Czech, the former dual number has been retained as a special plural form for some paired body part nouns to distinguish them from their non-body-part meanings. For example, ucho means "ear" or "pot handle", uši - the former dual form - means "ears" (but not "pot handles") and ucha - the former plural form - means "pot handles" (not "ears"). Similarly for oko ("eye"/"flake of grease on a soup") with differing plurals oči/oka.
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1170 | Is there a structured toki pona dictionary/thesaurus?
I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to create one.
Let me explain what I mean by "structured dictionary":
There are only 120-odd words in toki pona. The word jan refers to a person. Compounds are used to be more specific, ie jan pona is "friend", jan utala is "fighter", jan alasa is "hunter", etc. This is reminiscent of expressing the meaning of nouns through semantic primitives, a bit like Wilks (1975). So the set of words described by jan would be {"person", "friend", "fighter", "hunter", ...}. There are subsets which are more specific, so jan utala is {"fighter", "soldier", "mercenary", ...}. jan utala pi ma would be {"soldier", "private", "general", ...}
You can envisage it as a tree structure, where the leaves are the word meanings, and the roots (as there would be multiple trees: one for each 'top' primitive) encompasses all of them. As you wander down the tree, the path is an ever longer chain of toki pona words, and the set of meanings covered by those words becomes smaller and smaller.
Another example would be ilo, "tool". ilo toki is a tool for communication: {"telephone", "telegraph", "vhf radio", "loud hailer", ...}; ilo toki uta suli (tool talk mouth big) could be a loud hailer. Another sub-tree would capture wireless communication devices, perhaps ilo toki pi kon.
I know this somewhat goes against the toki pona philosophy of being a simple and small language, but it seems to me to more or less accidentally provide a useful set of semantic primitives that can be used to describe word meanings in general. So before I embark on creating such a structure, has anyone already attempted something similar? Surely there must be dictionaries of mulit-word toki pona expressions? I haven't been able to find a good one yet.
Wilks, Y (1975) An Intelligent Analyzer and Understander of English, Communications of the ACM 18(5):264-274
Proving a negative is always difficult, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious candidate for what you're looking for and if you made one yourself it would presumably fill an empty niche in the Toki Pona universe. At least I haven't found any sites written in English yet that seem to fit the bill.
The closest thing I can find to what you are looking for is a Toki Pona corpus search tool, which seems like it would be useful for tracking down examples of usage and might help you find compounds containing a particular word that have already been coined.
Also, I have yet to find two simpler things that would be good stepping stones for a hierarchically organized Toki Pona dictionary.
A non-minimal dictionary
Toki Pona-English parallel texts
All of the Toki Pona dictionaries I have found so far define just the basic vocabulary and do not provide entries for any multi-morpheme lexemes, even famous ones like jan utala.
Many of the dictionaries out there are more or less copies of the official dictionary, such as this one. Other dictionaries like this Wiktionary appendix do not provide definitions for whole Toki Pona expressions at a time.
Toki Pona-English parallel texts would help distinguish lexeme boundaries within complex phrases, since the presence or absence of pi is not a completely reliable cue as to whether a "real lexeme boundary" was intended.
It sounds like you're after a trie.
The closest example I can think of is this glosbe site. It has a search tool, which orders matches in the way you want, but not in the structure you want.
.
The only issue is that there are fan created/added word combinations which may not be 'official'.
This is what I would recommend too. It has a huge variety of languages too, so it works for more than just toki pona. You can add translations yourself with an account if you think something is missing.
I think you may find some of what you're looking for in the paper Basic concepts and tools for the Toki Pona minimal and constructed language by Renato Fabbri.
A first Toki Pona Wordnet was constructed relating each of the TP words in the dictionary to English Wordnet synsets [19] through the English lemmas. The canonical (i.e. Princeton) Wordnet only contains nouns, adjectives,verbs, and adverbs. Thus, particles were not considered. Numbers were considered adjectives. Words presented as adjectives in the dictionary were considered both as adjectives and adverbs. Prepositions were considered inall classes. [19]
The TPWordnetclass [10], provides such tentative TP Wordnets in their simplest form: the TP words are keysin a dictionary that returns the corresponding synsets.
A "synset" in WordNet is a set of cognitive synonyms, so this seems like a start towards what you want. pali pona!
The references are:
George Miller. 1998. WordNet: An electronic lexical database. MIT press
https://github.com/ttm/tokipona
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552 | Are there works composed in Quenya or Sindarin by people other than Tolkien himself?
Are there any works composed (e.g., peoms, songs, short stories) in either Quenya or Sindarin by other authors than JRR Tolkien himself?
I am already aware of some dialogues in the Lord of the Rings films, these do not count here as an answer.
Pater Noster in Quenya
Poems in Quenya
Some more poems in Quenya
Pater Noster in Sindarin (JRRT for comparison)
Pater Noster in Sindarin
Poems & Stories in Sindarin
Poem in Sindarin
NB: I am not competent to guarantee that any of these works are "correct" or "grammatical", with the exception of JRRT's submission.
I have to point out that the "Pater Noster in Sindarin" is written by Tolkien himself, and is therefore "correct" but not answering the question.
@杨Eugene -- Hopefully the edit helps!
Thanks, it does!
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727 | Is Glosa more than just a relex of English?
Looking for information on the International Auxiliary languages Interglossa and Glosa again, I stumbled over these sample texts in Glosa. I am astonished, how slavishly Glosa copies the English syntax: While some elements of a noun phrase or a verb phrase may be slightly reordered, translation unit after translation unit are completely parallel in the English and Glosa texts, even for rather complicated English sentences. And the English preference for past participles also carries over to Glosa in a one-to-one fashion.
Has Glosa any syntax of its own (independent from English)? Are there any Glosa idioms setting it apart from a relex of English?
Without having gotten down to the sample texts, in reading the Wikipedia article that you've linked to, I'd gotten the impression that English was a major influence on the grammatical structure of the language.
It's been a long while since I looked at Interglossa, btw, but at least the Lord's Prayer on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglossa does not look that English, and nor do the translations of bureaucratese in the Interglossa textbook (including the Atlantic Charter): https://sites.google.com/site/interglossa1943/home#etymology2.
While Glosa definitely does seem to take a lot of influence from English, it's grammar isn't quite so indistinguishable from English's as to be an obvious relex.
It avoids classic relex mistakes like including do-support, and while its tense-aspect system doesn't do anything too wild for English speakers, it uses a variety of particles rather than English's auxiliary-based periphrastic tenses. It's also noteworthy that it lacks plurals, a decidedly un-English-like feature. Both these features were likely inspired by Mandarin Chinese.
Glosa also has an article that is unspecified for definiteness, using u(n) for both "the" and "a(n)", which is a departure from its major influences -- English, which has distinct definite and indefinite articles; Mandarin Chinese, which doesn't have any such articles; and Esperanto, which possesses one explicitly definite article. However, this article's syntactic behavior does not seem notably different from the English or Esperanto articles, so it's not thinking too far outside the box there.
You could definitely argue that Glosa's departures from English are pretty small, and that it's thus still quite relex-y in spirit. It's certainly closer to normal English grammatically than Interglossa, which is reportedly based on Simple English. So it really depends exactly how far you think a conlang must depart from English grammatically to "count" as not being a relex.
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178 | What are the main limitations of Lojban?
Suppose we want to translate the whole of Wikipedia from English into Lojban, what are the main known big limitations or concerns we should be aware of? In other words, does Lojban as a language have sufficient expressive power for being translated from English?
There is a Lojban Wikipedia.
A considerable amount of texts (from a conlang point of view) has been translated to lojban; perhaps it doesn't answer you answer, but it's at least convincing.
One limitation: I'm reluctant to study it because I find its words ugly.
Length
A few things. First, Lojban often needs longer sentences to express something than it does in, for example, English.
Vocabulary
Secondly, Lojban's vocabulary isn't that big, especially in the domain of sciences. Words would have to be calqued, adapted from English, French, etc. or completely re-invented.
Loaning and naming
Thirdly, the English language (and many natural languages) loans words directly (for example, champagne could be *shampain and buoy could be *boy or *boi) without changing spelling (a slight counterexample would be German, which often changes the letter c pronounced [k] to the letter k, like Kanada and Vokabular).
Lojban doesn't. .romas. is Rome (Italy), .xavanas. is Havanas (Cuba) and .lidz. is Leeds (UK). This makes it confusing in some cases. How would Lojban adapt Turra Coo or people like Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela? The name should stay recognisable but pronounceable.
And though Lojban handles such slightly modified loans (called stage-2 fu'ivla), loaning many words would be a bit lameful, since Lojban has also a system to build compound words from native root-words.
Also, not more puns with Lojban.
I don't see how any of these are limitations with Lojban specifically. The length of a translated text is always going to vary from the source, and may often be longer because you have to include fluff to express information you naturally express in one language but not the other. Vocabulary can be built on, especially with compound words and loans. Why should loanwords be spelled the same as their source language, and trick readers into horribly mispronouncing names? I spell "karate", not 空手道. I also wish to see how you would translate that quote in any naturalistic language.
Why is Romas confusing and Rome isn't for a place named Roma?
@prosfilaes It's .romas., not Romas. Lojban doesn't use capital letters and cmene/names must be surrounded with periods. Also, there's no consistency with this sort of borrowing. On Lojban Wikipedia, the name Wikipedia is variously rendered as .uitkipediias., .uikipedi'as., and .uikipidi,ys., among others.
@AndrewRay Then it's .romas. versus .rome. Again, the city's name in Italian is Roma. Havana in Spanish is "La Habana". There would be no consistency if everyone just named these places like they are in their native tongue, either. More standard transliterations would helpful, but that's a choice, not a limitation.
Actually, buoy would be *booee, not *boy. At least here in America
One of Lojban's most famous features is, of course, its lack of syntactic ambiguity. While this is an advantage in some cases, it can also be a limitation. It wouldn't likely be an issue in something like Wikipedia, but does make certain kinds of wordplay impossible. Take for example this exchange from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:
'Who did you pass on the road?' the King went on, holding out his hand
to the Messenger for some more hay.
'Nobody,' said the Messenger.
'Quite right,' said the King: 'this young lady saw him too. So of
course Nobody walks slower than you.'
'I do my best,' the Messenger said in a sulky tone. 'I'm sure nobody
walks much faster than I do!'
'He can't do that,' said the King, 'or else he'd have been here first.'
In Lojban there is no way to conflate "nobody" meaning "no person" with "Nobody" meaning "someone named Nobody", because proper names are always preceded with the article "la". Other works that rely on wordplay based in syntactic ambiguity would also present major difficulties in translating to Lojban.
That said, there is a Lojban translation of Alice in Wonderland, so these difficulties aren't necessarily insurmountable.
But some languages also are unable to translate it and would explain the English version. In that way, Lojban is like those languages and the difference is not per se constructed but natural too.
@Duncan that is true, but I suppose those languages have their own wordplays. Lojban theoretically would not be able to have any wordplay like this, right?
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522 | Mixed writing systems - which words should have their own symbols?
Assume that a conlang is written partially with an alphabet and partially with pictograms. The idea is to have something like the Japanese writing system.
Does it follows the structure of natlangs to have symbols for the words which are of particular cultural importance for the speakers of this language? Is there a common pattern or system for a categorisation of words which have their own symbols in most of the natlangs using such a mixed writing system, e.g. man, woman etc?
This is an interesting question, but, of course, entirely subjective and therefore out of scope for SE. Quick answers: no, there is no such list; no, there are no such rules. Lastly, it's your invented language, so you get to decide which words get pictograms and which don't!
There are no rules for things like this, and whether it's a "good idea" is entirely up to you to decide. If you'd like to focus on your third sub-question that would be on-topic however. Perhaps instead of asking for a list, you could ask if there's a common way of categorising which ones would be given a pictogram and which ones can only be written phonetically.
@curiousdannii I tried to edit the question to make it less opion based.
Check out Maya, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and Linear B Greek. All have this feature.
There is already a conlang that kind of does that. In toki pona you can write the words in a set of pictograms (actually, there are several pictogrammatic writing systems, I'm referring here to the 'hieroglyphs' from the official book). As there are only 120 words, it's easy to have pictograms for all of them.
The only problem is what happens with other words. Names, for example. The toki pona solution is to select a hieroglyph whose word starts with the respective sound. This leaves some choice, as you typically have several pictograms available and you can choose a word whose meaning is somewhat relevant to the name. For example, Kanata (Canada) could start with the pictogram for kasi ("plant, leaf"), to link to the maple leaf; Nokisi (Norway) would start with nena ("hill, mountain"), etc.
Here you are using pictograms to spell a word, but it is easily conceivable to have a separate script for names and foreign words.
If the vocabulary of your language is substantially larger than toki pona's 120 words, you might not want to use pictograms for everything. In this case you could use them either for 'core' words (whether you define them by meaning, age, etymology or frequency), or it could be words that have no inflections (and thus don't change, eg function words like and and for in English).
In the end it's your choice how you solve this, but there are certainly some possible justifications for different choices that you could explore.
(I should probably clarify that kasi would only be the first of six hieroglyphs used to spell Kanata; usually they are then enclosed in a cartouche like in Egyptian hieroglyphs.)
One consideration is the source of the symbols themselves. DINGIR had the syllabic value /an/ in Sumerian, but it also stood in for the word "god" because An was a Sumerian god. (And, one step further, DINGIR still meant "god" in Akkadian even though the Akkadian word for god was now ilu.)
The Sinaitic inscriptions were written in an abjad, and yet (may have) used certain letters as the words that the letters were derived from: For instance, the glyph ʾ may have stood for ox (* ʾalp), h may have stood for celebration (* hillul), and r for head (* raʾsh), because the pictures that originally formed those letters depicted an ox, celebration, and a head.
So if your script derives some of its symbols from pictures of something, the symbol could stand in for the word that the glyph depicts (or once depicted). This is a little circular when trying to determine which words should have their own symbols, but the point is that what determines which words have this status is often just an accident of history instead of a categorization of important words.
Yes, exactly -- 'accident of history' is kind of what I meant by etymology in my answer.
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1056 | Are there languages with five conjugations? If not, how would one construct one?
Most languages I am familiar with have six different person/number combinations for verbs:
Singular
1st (I)
2nd (you)
3rd (he/she/it)
*Plural
1st (we)
2nd (you (all))
3rd (they)
Obviously, verb conjugation is more complicated than just these combinations (other features include tenses, aspects, mood (eg imperative), and gerunds), but for now, just focus on person/number. Is there some way to collapse these six combinations into five? On a related note, are there any natural languages with five conjugations?
Also, I need exactly five conjugations. Are there normal languages with only five conjugations? If there aren't, what would be the most realistic way to implement this?
You can collapse them anyway you really like.
If you have two features (number/person), it seems tricky to have five options (or any other odd number for that matter). However, there is an easy way: simply collapse singular and plural for one of the persons.
There is actually a real example in English (and several other languages): the pluralis majestatis ("Royal We"). Simply discard the first person singular and use the first person plural instead.
We are not sure what other languages use this, but we have definitely heard it in English and German. It would not be surprising to us if it occurred in other languages as well.
Sounds a bit odd, but would be an easy option.
"You" for singular and plural is standard English
There is of course Esperanto, conflating 2nd person singular and plural (let's ignore ci), very much the same as in English. Although, since the verb does not change (by person/number), I would not call this a conjugation.
There are other ways how to achieve exactly five conjugations. E. g. in pre-1953 Slovak in the past tense (that is also used for the conditional), the singular distinguished three genders (masculine, feminine, neutrum), but the verb form stays the same for each person. While in plural, only two different forms are present - masculine animate and "everything else". 3+2=5.
Example:
Singular:
masculine: 1st person chodil som, 2nd person chodil si, 3rd person chodil
feminine: 1st person chodila som, 2nd person chodila si, 3rd person chodila
neutrum: 1st person chodilo som, 2nd person chodilo si, 3rd person chodilo
Plural:
masculine animate: 1st person chodili sme, 2nd person chodili ste, 3rd person chodili
other: 1st person chodily sme, 2nd person chodily ste, 3rd person chodily
(som/si/sme/ste is an auxilliary verb).
Contemporary Czech has also exactly 5 conjugations in the past tense, but distributed differently (singular masculine, singular feminine+plural neutrum, singular neutrum, plural masculine animate, plural masculine inanimate+feminine)
Existing Other Person Conjugations
The wikipedia page on Grammatical Person, has this to say (emphasis mine):
Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person. The obviative is sometimes called the fourth person.
The term fourth person is also sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents, which work like one in English phrases such as "one should be prepared" or people in people say that..., when the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms. The so-called "zero person" in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as "one," but the problem with that is that English language constructions involving one, e.g. "One hopes that will not happen," are rare[citation needed] and could be considered expressive of an overly academic tone to the majority of people, while Finnish sentences like "Ei saa koskettaa" ("Not allowed to touch") are recognizable to and used by young children in both languages.
I think the grammatical persons of a language would be based on how the speakers of that language interact.
I would personally collapse singular and plural, and then think about what other possible persons there could be, adding fourth and fifth person conjugations as is fitting, but you could also remove a person.
No First Person
For example, you could have a heavy emphasis on an ego-less society, which would do away with the first-person. Pravic would refer to the "I" or "me" in the third person, as "The speaker".
Class-Based Person
Or you could have a language with a strong sense of caste or class, where there are separate second-person conjugations for people in higher, lower, or the same class.
Modern High German is like that: The verb endings for the 1pl and 3pl are always the same (e.g., wir sind, sie sind; wir haben, sie haben). Some dialects of German are going even further having the same endings for all plural forms.
But while the endings are homographs, they are still grammatically separate; German has 3 persons in both singular and plural. Otherwise you could argue that English only has two - I/you/we/you/they have and he|she|it has...
@OliverMason You can look at the conjugation as strictly changing the verb forms. And the person would then be realized in some other manner (syntax...).
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1092 | State-based analogue to distributive case
I am developing conlang that has grammatical cases system for nominals that for each spatial case there is state-based case.
In Finnic languages grammatical cases that denote states occur, examples in Finnish:
Essive (ESS) with the ending -na/-nä denotes being in state, corresponds to the combination 'as X' in English. lapsi - 'child', lapsena - 'as child / being a child'
dialectal Exessive (EXESS) with the ending -nta/-ntä denotes a departure from state, corresponding to English 'from being X...'. lapsi - 'child', lapsenta - 'from being child'
Translative (TRANSL) with the ending -ksi denotes a transition into state, corresponds to English 'to (becoming) X'. aikuinen - 'adult', aikuiseksi - 'to adult'. lapsenta aikuiseksi = '[maturing] from child to adult'.
There is clear spatial analogy:
Locative ↔ Essive
Ablative ↔ Exessive
Allative ↔ Translative
You can construct state-based analogues to other spatial cases. For example, for the Prolative case ('through X') we can make Essive-Prolative, which would mean 'passing through a state of being X / through way of being X"
There is a Hungarian grammatical case called Distributive (DISTR) with the ending -nként, which is equivalent to 'per X'. For example, hét - 'week', hetenként - 'weekly, once per week'. It has a clear spatial-temporal nature.
I am trying to come up with a state based analogue for this case. Let's call it 'Essive-distributive', but I am stuck with the expansion of the analogy. What exactly can 'per being in state' mean? Can anyone suggest a meaning and usage for such a case?
“each time you are asleep”, “each time Misha is on duty” could be examples.
Interesting concept for a case. In my interpretation this kind of an abstract distributive case would apply in sentences like this one (a probably very clumsy reformulation of a famous first sentence in literature)
Every unhappy family is different in their unhappiness.
I looked up the really case-rich conlang Ithkuil and did not find a precedent for this kind of case. Feel free to name it by any name you like. When you don't have an own idea, I suggest respective case for that one.
I suspect you could just make up a name. That's certainly a legitimate glossopoetical strategy.
In English, i'd just call it a distributive sense of the state-noun and have done with it: Such-and-such only happens thrice per childhood, you know!
Or ...thrice childhoodly if you prefer!
I frankly don't get the difference between LOC/ABL/ALL & ESS/EXESS/TRANSL, which I'm guessing must be a Finnish Thing.
I would understand "in the child" and "in childhood" to be locative senses of the thing-noun and state-noun respectively; "from the child" & "from childhood" likewise are ablative. So it is for "per child" and "per childhood", being the distributive sense.
If I understand you correctly (big if there!), you are looking for a periodical state that repeats, not necessarily at the same time interval (though the two might in reality be linked) — as it happens we are using the sun rising as a proxy for the time passing.
This could be a tree blossoming, or losing its leaves. It could be the tide coming in. It could be birds migrating and passing through. It could be a woman's menstrual cycle. It could be being asleep/awake.
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988 | How to naturally evolve verbs into adverbs or dependent clauses?
Currently I have a very simple proto-language which I'm trying to evolve. For example:
slishi hu ho shofli shofli pfufi tushi
repair person tool fish.V fish.V succeed cause
Person repairs fish net to have abundant catch.
However, this seems to be confusing and unwieldy, so I'm assuming that native speakers would feel the same and would attempt:
To change tushi into something similar to 'so that' combining two sentences where one causes another.
To change pfufi into an adverb - successfully
Something like (for example):
slishi hu ho shofli tushu shofli nshi pfufe he
repair person tool fish.V so.that fish.V AUX.FUT successfully 3.PRO
Person repairs fish net so that he will have an aboundant catch
Note that tushi (to cause) has been changed into tushu (so that) to make a conjunction and pfufi (to succeed) into pfufe (successfully) to make an adverb.
However I'm not sure what a natural way of doing this would be. Most guides for conlangs suggest to apply phonological evolution rules universally, so I'm not sure if it is natural to diverge [-i] into [-ɨ/e] and then [-u/e] to derive an adverb/preposition/conjunction and suggest to evolve the adverbs from nouns or verbs, but they don't provide guides for creating a derivation systems (that I found).
If this helps, the language later/earlier evolves tenses by adding the pronouns - ignoring other changes that happened in between:
slishi-he hu ho shofli tushu shofli nshi pfufe he
repair-1 person tool fish.V so.that fish.V AUX.FUT successfully 3.PRO
Person repairs fish net so that he will have an aboundant catch
I edited the first example to be more conventional. Does it really have five infinitive verbs? And a.thing.that.do really isn't very clear.
@curiousdannii I'm not sure there are infinitives - the first one is a predicate for example. At this stage there are no other form. I know this is unwieldy so I'm trying to evolve a way to change them into the proper forms (this is what the question is about). Re a.thing.that.do is a generic describer of a tool (better definition) - so 'tool to fish' -> fish net, 'tool to fight' -> weapon, 'tool to plow' -> 'a plow' etc. Let me edit.
Okay, you need to give much clearer glosses then. "to X" is convention for an infinitive, so don't say that if it's not what you're doing. Are there no distinct TAM forms?? Or did I misunderstand, and "ʂo.fli" is the syllables, not the morphemes?
@curiousdannii Sorry - this is a first conlang I'm really trying to create and I'm not a linguist. TAM is created by auxiliary verbs at this stage so 'person will fish' is 'shofli nshi xe' (lit. to fish to come person). Later the suffix is fused and with my current set of rules it would look like 'shovlinshye hu' where -nshy-e is a suffix denoting 3/FUT (after h is lost and ie changes into ye).
"Or did I misunderstand, and "ʂo.fli" is the syllables, not the morphemes?" - missed this. Those are syllables.
Ah, okay. Generally syllables aren't shown in glosses, unless actually relevant. You can probably cut them down to just one line.
This is more a lengthy comment on your question than a real answer, but comment space is restricted ...
You are undertaking a very difficult task by setting a starting point and an end point and asking for natural development between the two. This is difficult even when it is known that such a natural development exists because the two languages are attested natural languages and not constructed.
We know sound laws really well, and also the process of grammaticalization is fairly well understood. The evolution of different basic word orders is still under research, we know that it has happened but how exactly it happened, is less clear.
It seems that your are needing some grammaticalisation to get from the verb pfufi to the adverb pfufe. Here's a suggestion: Add a particle ye meaning roughly "like" to your proto-language, and the phrase pfufi ye will fill the role of an adverb. It is easy to conceive, that pfufi ye evolves to pfufe by just dropping one syllable (syncope). To make tushu from tushi a particle like vu might be applicable, but I have some difficulties to define its original meaning.
I think that language change is easier to "grow" than to "plot", i.e., it is easier to just apply changes to a proto-language and watch where they lead to than to interpolate between two stages of a language.
Of course you can invoke language contact to achieve a particular change in your language evolution, as kind of last resort to save the plot. Just don't overuse this.
To comment - I don't ask for pfufe exactly but how would the divergence happen (pfufi was just an example).
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612 | Language evolution in Ido
The Wikipedia article on Ido states that there have been almost no official changes to the Ido language since 1922. But Ido has a small speech community, and therefore there may be unofficial changes to the language.
How did Ido evolve over the last century?
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589 | What are the common features of "Elvish" conlangs?
I want to create a fantasy world with Elves speaking their own language. In order to avoid unwanted associations with works of other authors, the Elves should speak a newly invented language. What features make a conlang sound "Elvish" in a fantasy setting, delineating it from languages of other races (like humans, dwarves, or orcs)?
My picture of Elves is heavily influenced by the works of Tolkien. The Elves are tall and strong humanoids with very long live-span living in the forests of my fantasy world. They are fond of arts and crafts and of poetry, but also engage in fights and wars when necessary.
Elves like these are a common race in genre fiction by many authors, and they also occur in genre based games (e.g., Dungeons and Dragons). They often have typical Elvish names, and some authors also invented some bits of Elvish languages for them. So I assume there are some common features for Elvish languages. What are they?
EDIT: In the meantime, this Wikipedia article has acquired a quite comprehensive list of Elvish languages.
One way to look at "elvish" features is to compare how different elvish languages look, and to take inspiration from that.
A look at the phonologies of a few elvish languages:
Quenya
(phonology from here)
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ŋ
Stop p b t d k g
Fricative f v s (ç) x h
Trill r
Semivowel (ʍ) w j
Liquid l
Front Central Back
Close i(ː) u(ː)
C-Mid eː o:
O-Mid ɛ ɔ
Open a(ː)
Sindarin
(phonology from here)
Labial Dental Alveolar Lateral Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal m n ŋ
Stop p b t d k g
Fricative f v θ ð s ɬ χ h
Trill r
Approximant l j ʍ w
Front Central Back
Close i y u
Near-C ɪ ʊ
O-Mid ɛ ɔ
Open a
Some common denominators in Tolkien's Elvish: They all have distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops and (labial) fricatives, both have the somewhat /ʍ/ as a phoneme or allophone as well as /ŋ/, /x~χ/ and /h/. With vowels, they each have four vowel heights but nothing much in common beyond that. Allowed syllables seem to be (CC)V(CC) in Quenya (many more details at Wikipedia) and (C)V(C) in Sindarin, though I don't see that explicitly.
Pathfinder Elf Names
(names from here)
Male Names: Caladrel, Heldalel, Lanliss, Meirdrarel, Seldlon, Talathel, Variel, Zordlon.
Female Names: Amrunelara, Dardlara, Faunra, Jathal, Merisiel, Oparal, Soumral, Tessara, Yalandlara.
My interpretation of the names hints at some of these features: Only two nasals, voicing distinction, five vowels.
Allowed syllables: Apparently (C)V(CC) or (C)V(LC) where L is a liquid (l or r) or nasal
Dungeons & Dragons Elf Names
(names from 3.5 edition Player's Handbook p. 16)
Male Names: Aramil, Aust, Enialis, Heian, Himo, Ivellios, Laucian, Quarion, Soveliss, Thamior, Tharivol
Female Names: Anastrianna, Antinua, Drusilia, Felosial, Ielenia, Lia, Mialee, Qilathe, Silaqui, Vadanja, Valanthe, Xanaphia
Family Names: Amastacia, Amakiir, Galanodel, Holimion, Liadon, Meliamne, Naïlo, Siannodel, Ilphukiir, Xiloscient
Here we seem to have gemination at the end of words, vowel length, maybe uvular stop; th and ph are probably fricatives and not aspirated, judging by the presence of v and absence of f. Syllables seem to be (C)V(CC).
Using the very questionable methodology of taking the least common denominators of all of them would give us something like:
Labial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n
Stop p b t d k g
Fricative f v θ s z h
Trill r
Approximant l j w
Front Central Back
Close i u
Mid e o
Open a
If you want an elvish language to be easily recognizable as elvish, you might be able to copy some of these features. I'm not sure, though, that there is any feature that might be universally understood as elf-like.
Note the amount of names which has at least one /l/.
In Quenya, voiced stops occur only after a liquid or a nasal.
In addition to the phonological and phonotactical aspects given by @b a, I want to add some more phonotactical and statistical features for an Elvish language
Preference of front vowels /e, i/ over back vowels /o, u/
Restriction of word-final sound, words tend to end in a vowel or in one of the consonants /t, d, θ, ð, n, s, r, l/
The two-vowel sequences /ae/ and /ie/ occur frequently. Laura Wattenberg calls the combination ae "the defining fantasy vowel". It is very frequent in fantasy names, even more frequent than in Welsh.
I think also preference of front consonants may be a common trend, particularly with respect to trills or fricatives (/k/ might be fair game but /x/ would be strange, and /q/ is probably out of the question too). Mind you, Tolkien himself used some back consonants, so who knows...
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812 | How do you model language changes with wave theory (areal developments)?
I'd like to hear from anyone who has built a dialect continuum, in which innovations spreading from different centres affect overlapping subsets of the range (see wave theory). How do you model it? How do you manage the results?
I suppose I'd start with a list of towns and a table determining how likely a town is to adopt an innovation from each of its neighbors. The table can change over time as towns lose or gain influence, or new roads are made.
Then what? Maintain a separate grammar for each town? Impractical.
With a list of sound shifts, you can easily generate a given town's version of a given lexeme as needed; but managing changes in syntax or morphology is, I'd think, not so easy.
I have never tried to do it, but I think the approach you call "impractical" is the way to go. You need to maintain a grammar and a vocabulary for each town and for each period (say, a snapshot every 50 or 100 years) to keep consistency.
The good news that can save a lot of time is, that you probably don't need complete reference grammars for each step in the evolution: Start with a good grammar of the oldest stage of your language continuum and than write the grammars of the evolving dialects/languages in terms of differences to the old grammar.
Only when accumulated differences become too large to be handled well, write a full grammar again.
Yes, having a separate grammar for each town would be the way to go.
When modelling the spread of linguistic difference, do bear in mind geography, rather than just distance. Some regions can be very close in mountainous terrain but still have very different languages/dialects, whereas regions in flat plains (without major rivers) tend to be far more similar.
If you have a map with geographical features, use something like A* to calculate the distance between towns.
As regarding changes in grammar: if your grammar is expressed in the form of rewrite rules, you could allow them to change as well. A fairly radical change would be from
NP -> adj n
to
NP -> n adj
ie the adjective moves behind the noun it modifies. The resulting grammar would of course still be valid. However, you want to make such changes very rare and slow. Alternatively, annotate each rule with a probability, and then have both rules in parallel. Change would then be an increase/decrease in probability.
For language change in general you might be interested in Piotrowski's Law. (Unfortunately the only explanation I have found for it is in German). This models mathematically how change spreads throughout language.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06324 In English but analysis of Polish texts.
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1375 | Syllabic restriction/word boundaries set by IPA? Or it is decided by language creator
When creating syllables we basically require an onset, nucleus, and a coda. Now, usually, all language have an onset, and the coda is fairly optional. Before creating a phonetic system, we first decide the word order, and rules about what sounds are allowed in the onset, nucleus and coda positions.
My question is focused on the 2nd part. For example, in English, the sound [ŋ] isn’t allowed to begin a word, but it can begin a syllable; and in Dothraki, the consonants [ɡ], [q], and [w] can’t end a word.
So these restrictions, do they arrive because of some IPA rule? Or is it the developer that creates these rules?
"In English, the sound [ŋ] ... can begin a syllable." Do you have any examples of this?
It's from the book, "The art of language creation."
I couldn't find the passage you quote, else I'd insert your mystery symbol for you. Do you see it here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart
@AntonSherwood yes I can, thanks a lot, buddy.
@AntonSherwood the passage is from the book which is written by David Peterson
I looked in the most obvious places in the book which is written by David Peterson, or at least a book which is written by David Peterson, and didn't find it. How about a page number or something?
@AntonSherwood I have an e-book, so the pages might be few pages back or forth. In the phonotactics section, page 58. Below the chart.
The phonotactics of a language, what you have described, is the silent partner of phonology. The analogy I like to use is that a language's phonology is its periodic table (with individual phonemes as individual elements), while its phonotactics are the entire rest of its chemistry. Higher level stuff, like morphology, semantics, pragmatics, are things like biology, psychology, sociology.
Just like every language has its own phonology, every language has its own phonotactics. There are languages that can put /ŋ/ in onset (for example, Vietnamese) or /h/ in coda (Arabic). There are languages that can't make /s/ clusters, or any clusters for that matter (Hawaiian).
The IPA is the "Grand Unified Periodic Table of Linguistics"; it's stated purpose is to label every sound used in a human language, and does not restrict their arrangement in anyway. There is no "Grand Unified Chemistry of Linguistics"; phonotactic laws are usually described in plain language, although there is a notation to succinctly describe allophonic variation (that is, how phonemes are realized as phones in different environments) and phonemic evolution (how a language's phonemes evolve over time).
Indeed -- the IPA attempts to DESCRIBE sounds, not PRESCRIBE anything. There are no IPA rules that prohibit anything.
in fact, restriction of /ŋ/ to coda position only is sometimes considered an Indo-Europeanism as most other languages with it as a distinct phoneme are perfectly happy including it in the onset (although many Sinitic languages either have or are in the process of losing it in onset position too)
@Tristan And of course there are plenty of (modern) Indo-European languages that are fine with initial /ŋ/ as well.
@JanusBahsJacquet I didn't know that! Do you have any examples?
@Tristan Well, I say ‘plenty’ – there are some, at least. Albanian does (nga ‘at, from, to’, also pronounced as [ŋɡ]), and some of the remnant Celtic languages have [ŋ] as the result of /g/ with nasal mutation (Welsh fy ngorsaf ‘my station’, Irish i ngairdín ‘in a garden’, Manx cha ngowee ‘will not go’). I seem to recall something about some Indic or Iranian language(s) also having it, but I don’t know anything about modern Indo-Iranian, so I have no idea which one(s) it was. I thought it might have been Kalasha, but it doesn’t seem like it.
ah, Albanian is definitely a good example. In the Celtic languages are those nasals genuinely onsets?
@Tristan I just randomly saw your comment here now, nearly two years late. You could argue that things like possessive determiners, prepositions and negators are essentially proclitics and /ŋ/ thus not true onsets; but there are other words that cause nasalisation that would be harder to consider proclitic; e.g., Irish seacht/ocht/naoi/deich ngairdín ‘seven/eight/nine/ten gardens’, cá ngabhfaidh tú? ‘where will you go?’ In older Irish, adjectives after the gen.pl. were also nasalised (na ngealaí ngeala ‘of the bright moons’), but not anymore.
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1746 | How can I make complex relative clauses?
I can make simple relative clauses that share arguments just fine, but I struggle with certain clauses.
Take the following English sentences:
Someone killed* a person*
I hated the killing*.
You saw a person*.
In English, this would be nested as "You saw the person whose killing by someone I hated." However, that uses a copious amount of particles, which is incompatible with my heavily agglutinating conlang, and I don't want to relex English anyway.
How could I turn something like this into a sentence with relative clauses in an agglutinating SOV language? I tried making parts of this, but each has its own problem:
|R 1-NOM R person-S-ACC kill-PST-NMZ-ACC dislike-INT-PST| contains the clauses that would become relative, except I can't find a way to make the main clause reference the person behind multiple layers of clauses.
|2-NOM R thing-NOM kill-PST person-ACC see-PST| has the main clause and what I believe would be the first layer of the clauses, but I can't find a way to add descriptors to the verb without nominalizing it, which would ruin the entire clause.
In terms of different approaches to relative clauses, Hittite does it "backward" from English: it puts a marker on the noun in the relative clause, and then has a pronoun that's used in the main clause to point back to it. This means it should be compatible with basically anything you do with your nouns.
Quoting my answer on another site:
Hittite puts the noun inside the relative clause, then puts a pronoun in the main clause. The case of this pronoun indicates the role of that noun in the main clause.
ÌR.MEŠ=YA=wa=za ku-ēs dā-s nu=war=as=kan kattanta pehute-t nu=war=as=mu arha upp-i
subjects=my=QUOT=INT which-N.PL take-2S.PST and=QUOT=3P.ACC=MOD away lead-2S.PST and=QUOT=3P.ACC=1S.DAT back send-IMP.SG
"My subjects that you have taken, you have led them away, send them back to me!"
Or in idiomatic English: "Send back my subjects that you have taken and led away!"
nasma=tta URUKÙ.BABBAR-sas ZAG-as ku-is BĒLU maninkuwan nu ERIN₂.MEŠ ANŠU.KUR.RA.MEŠ apē-dani wek-ti
or=2S.LOC Hattusa-GEN border-GEN who-N.SG lord-N.SG near and soldiers chariots that-DAT.SG request-2S
"Or the lord of the borders of Hattusa (NOM) who is near to you, ask that one (DAT) for soldiers and chariots"
Or in idiomatic English: "alternately, ask the border-keeper who is closest to you for soldiers and chariots". The noun is in the nominative since it's the subject of the relative clause; the pronoun is in the dative because it's the indirect object of the main clause.
If necessary, the noun can also be repeated in the main clause; this is helpful when there are several relative clauses in a row, to emphasize which one goes where.
dU-as kuē-dani UD-ti hatuga tethi-ski-t […] ANA ĜIŠGIGIR-ya=kan kuē-dani apē-dani UD-ti ar-hahat […] ĜIŠGIGIR-ya tūriyan apātt=a dāi-r
stormgod-N.SG which-LOC.SG day-LOC.SG fearsomely thunder-ITER-3S.PST […] LOC chariot=MOD which-LOC that-LOC day-LOC stand-1SG.PST […] chariot-ACC harnessed there-and take-3PL.PST
"The day on which the Storm-God thundered furiously, the chariot on which I stood on that day, they took the harnessed chariot"
Or in idiomatic English: "they took the harnessed chariot that I stood on on the day when the Storm-God thundered furiously".
@Mlvluu It's multiple clauses, but they're linked to each other via relative markers. Using one of those markers in a clause signals that it's a relative that's going to be referenced in the next one.
I can't find a way to make this fit something like the example I gave. How would you do it?
@Mlvluu Something like… "I hated the killing of a person-REL. You saw them-DEM."
Could I do |1-NOM R person-ACC kill-PST-NZ-ACC dislike-INT-PST 2-NOM person-DEF-ACC see-PST|?
Or maybe |2-NOM R 1-NOM dislike-INT-PST R person-ACC kill-PST-NZ-GEN person-ACC see-PST|?
Simplifying a little, I do this by letting combinations of case markers reference their foregoing nouns, like pronouns.
1. What does that look like in simple examples?
Here in SOV using case suffixes and freestanding pronouns, "referring" case first so it reads kind of like "the ACC object is the NOM up next." You can rearrange that sort of thing.
Fred likes trees which lean.
Fred-NOM trees-ACC like ACC-NOM lean.
Fred points toward trees which lean.
Fred-NOM trees-DAT point DAT-NOM lean.
You don't necessarily need the first -NOM if the subject is always first.
Fred owns the horse and kicked Bob.
Fred-GEN the horse-POS owns, GEN-NOM Bob-ACC kicked.
Fred owns the horse that Bob kicked.
Fred-GEN the horse-POS owns Bob POS-ACC kicked.
Fred owns the horse that kicked Bob.
Fred-GEN the horse-POS owns POS-NOM Bob-ACC kicked.
2. What does that look like for my example?
You saw the person whose killing by someone I hated.
You-NOM person-ACC saw, I ACC-GEN killing-POS someone-ERG POS-ACC hated.
3. What if I have multiple objects of the same type?
For me, the case particles also "and" by repeating.
Fred likes trees and buildings which lean and which stink.
Fred-NOM trees-ACC buildings-ACC like ACC-NOM lean [ACC-NOM] stink.
If a verb always comes last, you may not need the second 'ACC-NOM' to "and" there. A "zero-and" was an emergent behavior from my syntax which I love.
The speaker should decide whether the intended antecedent is clear in context...
Yuki teaches Japanese and Javanese, which is uncommon in Tokyo.
Yuki-NOM Japanese-ACC Javanese-ACC teaches, ACC-NOM uncommon Tokyo-LOC is.
... whether you are better off with two sentences or a different tool (a "verb case" for this and other non-finite verbs? a pro-verb to refer to a verb?)...
Yuki teaches Icelandic and Javanese, which is uncommon in Tokyo.
Yuki-NOM Icelandic-ACC Javanese-ACC teaches. Teaching-NOM those subjects-ACC Tokyo-LOC is uncommon.
Or perhaps use word order to link by proximity. Below there are two different "locative objects." Context might already tell the listener that "they" can't take "the day." Still each appears closest to the clause where it is relevant.
The day on which the Storm-God thundered furiously, the chariot on which I stood on that day, they took it
The day-LOC the Storm-God-NOM thundered furiously, the day-LOC I-NOM the chariot-LOC stood, they-NOM LOC-ACC took.
4. What does that look like in a more complex example?
Alice sees Bob, who points at Charlie, who runs from Alice, who is Bob's neighbor and boss.
Alice-NOM Bob-ACC sees, ACC-NOM Charlie-DAT points, DAT-NOM Alice-ABL runs,
ABL-NOM-POS Bob-GEN neighbor ABL-NOM-POS boss is.
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597 | Is there evidence that any natural languages were actually constructed?
Is there any evidence that a ‘natural’ language that exists today was created by somebody a thousand (or two) years ago. And that it evolved till today?
I'd like to point out that the definition of natural language is (retronym, linguistics) Any human language that has evolved naturally in a community, usually in contrast to computer programming languages or to artificially constructed languages such as Esperanto. Could you clarify what you mean by the quotes around 'natural'? Otherwise, this question has by definition no answer (if natural language's definition is held) or is too broad (if you don't define the scope of ''natural' language').
Possibility? Of course, there is always a possibility, but rather remote one, if you mean a full featured well-known modern language.
The best candidates are "taboo languages", where the lexical items are replaced because of taboo/religious pressure. Perhaps the best known is Dyirbal, where a special version of the language is to be used in front of "tabooed" persons.
Though it probably does not go millennia into the past, and it's questionable if it should be considered a language, since it is just a vocabulary encoding.
These sound like registers to me.
Were some cants and argots constructed? The established ones have probably become 'natural'.
Yes, the Damin language (Wikipedia article), a ceremonial language and only natural click language outside Africa, was probably constructed.
You could argue that modern Hebrew is at least partly constructed.
Hebrew fell into disuse and only survived as a 'sacred' language in a religious context. Then, with the rise of the Zionist movement towards the end of the 19th Century, Hebrew was modernised and used as a lingua franca in the Palestine region. In the process, aspects of Hebrew variants were combined, and the vocabulary was extended to allow the use of Hebrew in modern day life.
See the Wikipedia article on the Revival of Hebrew.
I know the intricacies of modern Hebrew, I wouldn’t argue that. :-)
On re-reading the question, this is actually kind of the other way round: a natural language from more than 2000 years ago died out and got revived through constructing a modern version of it.
People learn languages from other people who speak them. If someone ever got others to adopt his language as their "natural language," they would have had to learn it from him. Without a community of speakers, it would have been impossible for this to happen. At some point we have to account for the fact that someone would have had to design the language and actually teach it to others.
I believe that this has never happened in recorded history. We do indeed find that an early Greek philosopher named Pherecydes invented an "artificial" word for "table":
He maintained that the divine name for "table" is θυωρός, or that which takes care of offerings. (Diogenes Laertius 1.119)
There is no evidence for anyone ever having invented an entire language, which would certainly be much more notable.
This leaves thousands of years of prehistory (before the invention of writing) when this could have happened, but it seems much more difficult to design a language without writing, or, for that matter, to do it without the linguistic knowledge that exists today.
Coining of new words has always happened, but that is language change, which develops from an existing language, and not the invention of an entire language from scratch.
I disagree with your claim that no evidence anyone invented an entire language. People these days do it all the time and my answer provides some tentative claims (depending on definition of entire language).
Of course there is evidence for people having invented entire languages. This has happened with some frequency throughout history. The questionable thing is more a matter or if there was one that was constructed several thousand years in the past that's still in use.
Cryptolects (aka Cants or Secret languages) come to my mind as candidates. While they are typically not fully constructed, they often contain a constructed core vocabulary making the language unintelligible to outsiders. When they exist long enough, they are learned as first language by the group members.
Examples of such cryptolects include Verlan (French based) and Läppe Tellep (German dialect based).
EDIT: It took me some time of searching for this one because I forgot the name: Eskayan spoken on Bohul island in The Phillipines.
EDIT2: Another example where it is probably no longer decidable whether it is an isolate language or a secret language is the Nihali language in central India.
Eskayan is a bit dubious of an example because it's a) only ~100 years old, not 1,000, b) I can't find any strong evidence of people actually speaking this outside of very specific contexts (i.e. is not how I interpret OP's meaning of "natural") and c) it's more or less just Boholano with a largely artificial lexicon: If only a (partially-)constructed lexicon satisfies criteria, e.g. Turkish would be a much better candidate.
Indeed, time depth is a problem—it will be very hard to find something fitting that is a millennium old or older.
I'd be willing to bet that with enough digging one might find a secret "language" with only an artificial lexicon especially among clergy that may have lasted in some form for a while, but, again, it would only be used for very specific purposes and only by a very few people.
Depending if you include scripts in the definition of "natural language", Hangul is a famous example of an alphabet that was created in the 15th century and has evolved since then.
In addition, the notoriously difficult Tangut script was created "in a very short time" around 1036 and was widely used in books and inscriptions by the Western Xia for about 500 years.
Yeah, I was going to mention Hangul as example of successful man made script, but anyways it’s not a language
Are there any scripts that weren't constructed by someone? At least Glagolitic and Cyrillic definitely were.
@VladimirF my examples are scripts we know were created in a short amount of time
OK, but so are mine.
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555 | Are there nasalized nasal consonants?
As in, [ñ] or [ñ̃]. It seems to me you can make a nasal sound more nasal, maybe by stressing your nose muscles or something in that sense. Does this exist?
EDIT:
Apologies, I was thinking about Nareal consonants, which do apparently exist. (see answer by me below, the other answers are also good.)
This isn't meant as an answer, but in addition to the ñ (eñe) there is the Portuguese "ão," which (this is the closest I can come up with) sounds like a very nasal "ow." Oh, and by the way, welcome to Conlang! Go ahead and please take our [tour] and visit the [help] to learn about the site. You may also find [meta] useful for discussion about the site (I see you've reached the rep needed to use meta, so you're good.) Great first post, and have fun!
Nasal consonants are not nasal because you use any "nose muscles", but because the nasal passage is open and air is passing through it as well as the mouth. To my knowledge, the nasal passage does not have different degrees of being open or closed, so there wouldn't be any way to make a nasal consonant more nasal.
However, there are definitely some sounds that are less nasal than standard nasal stops. Prenasalized and poststopped consonants, where a nasal followed by a non-nasal stop is treated as a single consonant, exist and are phonemic in some languages. There are also denasal phones, in which the nasal passage is open and used as a resonant cavity but air does not flow out the nose (think of how someone sounds when they have a stuffy nose). While denasals are not phonemic in any natlang to my knowledge, they are sometimes allophonic or phonetically present in a language that is losing its nasals.
Supposedly some languages actually do distinguish two degrees of nasalisation in addition to non-nasal in vowels according to Wikipedia, but i'm unable to access the original citation and that's in vowels, not consonants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_vowel_#Degrees
@Gufferdk Vowel nasalization I would believe could have degrees, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really know myself.
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1067 | How do I naturalistically merge two languages without a clear Substrate and Superstrate?
For my latest worldbuilding project, I'm trying to create a naturalistic language for a fictional empire I've been creating. This empire was born at the end of the Bronze Age when various kingdoms and city-states voluntarily united to defend against the growing power of a thalassocracy.
Though the story of the people who speak this language is more or less ironed out, I can't figure out how to proceed when devising a language for this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and not very centralised empire.
Though the languages spoken within the empire would all be related sister-languages derived from the same Proto-Lang, I don't know how to determine whether one of these languages becomes more "prestigious" while the others remain as just dialects.
Do I just pick the language with the most speakers? Do I just pick the language that the Emperor speaks, even if the rest of the (very powerful) nobility might speak another language entirely? Do I unite the languages in a single koinè? If so, how?
In fact, there are a lot of possibilities, and many of them are attested in the history of natural languages.
Majority language wins. This happened in China at least twice, it was conquered and ruled by foreign people (Mongolians, Manchu), but the ruling class became sinicized. It also happened in medieval France and Spain - they were conquered and ruled be Germanic tribes (Franks and Burgundians for France, Vandals and Goths for Spain), but the majority language of the residents won out.
Most prestigious language wins. This happened in antiquity in the Roman empire, and we see it in many post-colonial states in Africa. There are some prerequisites for that, such as a working educational system helping that.
Pidgins and Creoles emerge, and a Creole wins. This can be watched in Papua New Guinea, where Creole languages like Police Motu and Tok Pisin are becoming the de facto standard of communication.
Something else happens. The case of English is not as clear as my points 1 through 3 suggest: While the majority language finally won, it was heavily impacted and changed by the languages of the conquerors (Normans and Danes).
Stable multi-linguality. Quite rare in the wild, but Switzerland with a coexistence of Swiss German, French, and Italian is an example. The fourth language of Switzerland, Romansh, is under pressure, despite attempts of language preservation.
Mixed language. This is very rare in the wild, but there are a few mixed languages out there, like Michif - in this language the verb phrases come from Cree and the noun phrases come from French, forming a stable mixed language.
One you could add tho the list is equilibrial code switching: a situation where two (or more) languages are used simultaneously and consistently. This is often heard in the Philippines, for example, where Tagalog & English teeter-totter back and forth. Sometimes whole phrases or sentences in one language become whole sentences in the other; and in between you get a kind of random mix of the two (Tagalog particles on English nouns or verbs; Tagalog nouns or verbs with English particles.
This also happens in the Canadian north with Inuktitut and English, usually limited to word/phrase/sentence switching.
because, i try to learn chinese, which is for me, cantonese dialect i have difference between, learning words and learning language, i can say that details can be, really important
like, in vietnamese you have, xin loi, or you have specific, anh / chi, for saying mr or, mrs, and therefore you have, whole expression 'excuse me mister', xin loi anh
which, in cantonese sounds, very much alike tsing man, or qing wan, in chinese simplified, but its formal
because, i read about Angkor in cambodia and you see, that names of cities in cambodia was, completely random, so you have Chena, or other and it means not more than typical , situation which was calling some hill, 'hill number 232', and this is quite alot names in cambodia, so you cant put any importance to names when, learning asian language, and best suggestion is to make list of words from dictionary, to later try to abreviate to them, because to learn to say something is completely something else
for example, story from classical CW Ceran book, when scientist had list of 1051 words, from some old african ancient empire, and even emperor of france promised to him to, publish this words and allow people in morocco and tunisia learn, when actually this words from stone of rosetta, was maybe his own invention
so, you see that examples teach about, what is proficiency and unless , you want to be example of free interpretation, you should work in points, not in line because words have separate meaning, but phrases which mean something are, mostly very small things, like comments, or thoughts that only in small amount can describe something
books can, be example of really big , problems that somebody described in hope to, find some answers, but very often the truth is otherwise than assumed by author, and reading about cleopatra egypt, and some person name achilles can, bring to thought some conclusion that, this is just unreal and, you cant belive that this country existed , without war which doesnt really appear , and this is one of points, that you must consider opposite story , and the story can be really silly
for, example who will guarantee, that hannibal didnt, burn egipt 3 times, and exactly where did he, take elephants from ? or, exactly if there was empire in Angkor, from east to india and even bigger, you have 2 theories already, first that if there was food distribution, if synaj, named Myanmar, was cut off from food transport, then myanmar would die as, country and this question about, empire and economy
or, that where today is, pakistan previously was Bengal, and otherwise then where exactly was india back then ? or, how this happened that this countries changed in places ? because, this is political issue about, past that something was located somewhere else, and only today you think that all was the same
but, unless this is historical question , you see that language doesnt explain what happened, and people expect to learn everything in one, because they think this is obvious , but usually everything in life seems to be, some joke and unless you dont want to become, object of laughter as legendary hero who , found the truth but didnt noticed that, this truth is a bit useless , you should plan your learning, and this is only time, that can help to find way, because its like jungle of problems and, even ancients didnt thought somebody can answer all questions
you have, example of Jingwu the school that transformed kung fu, at first you think that this is some, frog school of asking this book, because word seems very much alike, qingwa , and because title say transformation you begin to ask what, transformations author suggests, to change stupid questions to something more logical, which is very rare idea, and this is reflection
so, mostly you find reflections and, there is no special revelations, but where appears such difference, like notation, between vietnamese and chinese language, you start worry, who is right here
so, it is better to stick to your, principle that something is more important , and have some direction because it works much better and gives some results which doesnt seem strange, or even uncomprehensible
best wishes, and good luck
Thank you for these examples, but I'm not really sure how they help us understand how to create a conlang with super- and sub-strate langauges.
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1611 | Why would a language created by humans lack the /j/ semivowel, and even the /i/ vowel?
What I mean is the sound /j/ (as in English yellow and French hyène 'hyena') is the most common semivowel around the world. This phoneme is highly conserved in Indo-European languages (this language family include Italic languages like French and Italian, Germanic languages like English and Dutch, Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, etc.).
Also, the sound /i/ (as in English hippie) (the word hippie is also used in French) in one of the most, if not the most common vowel around the world.
Both phonemes are almost universal, as is the consonant /m/ (as in English mother, and French mère 'mother').
I know many languages that lack the semivowel /w/ like Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Russian (the semivowel /w/ is found in both English as in world, and French as in oiseau 'bird').
In the universe I am creating, there is a species named ogres (their scientific name is Homo corpulentus 'obese human', so they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). In the most spoken language used by ogres, there are five basic vowels:
/a/ (as in French arbre 'tree'), the sound corresponding to the /a/ in English gasp;
/ɔ/ (as in English oar, and French ordinateur 'computer');
/u/ (as in English cool, and French ouvrier 'worker');
/y/ (as in French univers 'universe');
and the sound corresponding to French /ø/ (as in euphémisme 'euphemism').
There are no diphthongs in the most spoken language used by ogres, but there are long vowels, and two nasal vowels: /ɑ̃/ as in French antagoniste 'antagonist', and /ɔ̃/ as in French mouton 'sheep; mutton'.
Also, the most spoken language used by ogres has both the semivowel /w/, and the semivowel corresponding to the /ɥ/ in French fruit 'fruit'.
So, I wonder why would a language created by mammals from the Homo genus lack the semivowel /j/, and even the vowel /i/.
One simple way to make this happen would be to make ogres unable to raise their tongues to the roof of their mouths.
[i] and [j] both require that, so they are now impossible for ogres.
Most of the other sounds you mentioned ([a], [o], [u], [ø], [ɑ̃], [ɔ̃] and [w], if I counted correctly) do not use a raised tongue and are still possible.
The only problem would be [y], [ɥ]. (That second one is the IPA symbol for the labio-palatal approximant, the French ui.) I propose that you could open [ø] to the open front vowel [œ] and lower [y] to the now-unused mid front vowel [ø]. On the other hand, I admit, I don't know how to best take care of [ɥ] here.
Another way would be to just say that the ogres can't raise their tongues without also rounding their lips, that might be biologically feasible, and it would allow [y] and [ɥ], while ruling out [i] and [j]. (Rounded [j͗] would still be possible.)
On the very other hand, if you're just wondering whether it could naturally happen: Probably. According to Phoible, 92% of human languages have [i] and 90% have [j], so it stands to reason that at least about 1%, i.e. one or two dozen (!) languages, have neither. Lacking both of them is therefore still naturalistic.
Inability to raise the tongue sounds like it could work - though I guess you might as well call it not having a tongue altogether. That would also limit the available consonants, which could be interesting. A humanoid losing its tongue through evolution sounds rather implausible however.
@Domino I suppose I could've gone with "ogres don't have tongues", but it seemed OP wanted them to have phonetic capabilities as close to human ones as possible.
The roundedness might be the solution. Except for [a], all vowels in the described language are rounded. Maybe their lips could just be naturally rounded, so that unrounded vowels would be harder to pronounce and roundedness the default, resulting in [y] and [ɥ] to be more likely than [i] and [j].
@LukasG Ah, lovely; yes, that'd be a good solution too!
Lacking /j/ and [j] is entirely plausible, no explanation needed. Attic Greek, for example, lost [j] and did just fine without it for hundreds of years.
Lacking [i] is harder to explain. There's a strong tendency for vowels to expand to fill the available space, metaphorically speaking. Human languages are under a lot of evolutionary pressure to convey as much information as possible without exceeding the limits of our auditory systems, so if there's a way to convey more information without causing problems for processing, languages will use it.
What this means is, since [i] is very easy for humans to hear, human languages tend to make use of it in one way or another. Even if a language doesn't have /i/, [i] will tend to appear as an allophone of something else. This is why it appears in so many different languages. For example, Ubykh is generally analyzed as having only two vowel phonemes, a high one and a low one, but that high one will still surface as [i] to convey more information about the surrounding consonants.
If you don't want any [i] sound in your language, while still being naturalistic, you'll probably want to invoke some physical reason. The speakers of your language, from the sound of it, are biologically different from modern humans. You could simply make [i] difficult for them to produce or distinguish, for various reasons—Richard suggests production difficulties but you could also invoke some perception difficulties. The human ear is tuned to be more sensitive to some frequencies than others, and perhaps the large gap between the formants in [i] is not as distinctive to them as it is to us.
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2067 | How to prevent your conlang from explosively growing
I have made many conlangs in my life but they all wind up facing the same issues, and I am not sure how to prevent it.
I wind up with countless different forms of each word as modifiers stack up onto each other (Like in my current one I have things like animacy agreement on verbs which also have a tense system on top of that, which combinatorically explodes in size very quickly). And this is not the end of it, as these all independently evolve and begin to change so much from one another that they aren't recognizable as the same word.
But, looking at actual languages, we see this does not occur, you don't have something like the Animate Imperfective aspect of a verb becoming its own independent word over the years. So, what exactly am I doing wrong? Should I not be phonetically evolving these compounds? Or should I only phonetically evolve, like, the animate marked verb, but not the animate imperfective?
Example to show what I mean: (assume VOS)
Jani-ta-sak, Jani is verb, -ta is animate agreement marker, and -sak is the imperfective aspect. But over time, Janitasak would diverge quickly from like, Janitamisi, to the point of unrecognizability. So, is this wrong? Should I just evolve Janita and keep -sak as a suffix, instead of evolving Janitasak as a whole?
This is just a struggle I have always had with conlanging and I want to try to avoid it this time as I am really fond of this language and don't want to have to throw it away.
Consider whether you might, instead of evolving single words, evolve grammatical structure instead. English, for example, has lost or simplified verb conjugations as compared with either Norman French or German, the use of the second person informal is basically seen only in archaic usages, grammatical gender has been replaced by natural gender, etc.
Not sure how to do that naturalistically without heavy contact with another language with a vastly different grammar, like what happened to English, which this language won't have. Also doesn't really answer my question, sorry.
Having a huge combinatorical space of verb forms is not so unusual for natural languages as well, thinking of cases like Geogian or the Turkic languages. As long as the combinatorical form are quite predictable there is nothing wrong with that.
At the risk of asking a question with an obvious answer, are you mapping out the evolution of your conlang?
@JamesGrossmann Yeah, I am.
The most important thing to remember is: if you're going for naturalism, speakers need to be able to learn patterns and extrapolate them between words. If a sound change gets in the way of this process, analogy will intervene to fix it.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the inflections you have will stay the same. Maybe animacy and aspect markers will merge, and you'll end up with six distinct markers instead of two-crossed-with-three. Maybe some especially common words won't get evened out, leaving you with certain irregular verbs ("be" is often like this). But fundamentally, people can't learn a new inflection for every single word, so analogy will smooth out the worst of the irregularities.
Thanks for the tip! Can you elaborate on what exactly you mean by analogy and perhaps create some examples to help me understand? Would be appreciated. : )
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1025 | Is this translation of "May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies" correct?
I'm trying to translate this sentence:
"May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies"
to tlhIngan-Hol / Klingon, this will be used as a toast at a friends' wedding (of all things). While my understanding of Klingon grammar is pretty basic, this task seems reasonable enough. Using The Klingon Dictionary I've got this far:
jaghpu'ma' chim nach HomDu'vaD matlhutlhjaj
Where:
jaghpu'ma' is "our enemies"
chim is "be empty"
nach is "head", Hom is bone - I'm using nach HomDu' as a stand-in for "skulls" unless I find something better (see my other question*, also, see update below)
-vaD (if I understand correctly) marks the sentence so far as a purpose clause, so roughly "used for"
matlhutlh is "we drink"
-jaj makes the sentence into a "wish", XXXjaj translates as "may XXX"
So a rough literal translation back to English is something like "May we drink using our enemies' empty head-bones"
Is this correct? Any way to translate the sentence better?
Thanks.
[Update from 2022]
The word for "skull" is DughrI' (details in other question, it was added to the lexicon after this question was posted).
So the corrected rendition is:
"May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies"
jaghpu'ma' chim DughrI'Du'vaD matlhutlhjaj
Still not sure that's a correct / the best phrasing.
*: Addressing this explicitly as this question was marked as duplicate. This is not a duplicate of the question Is there a word for 'skull' in Klingon - that question asks for a specific word, while this question deals with the validity and best phrasing of a sentence (regardless of what's the best Klingon term for that specific term).
Possible duplicate of Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?
@Victor - not a duplicate, but obviously they are related - this question deals with the validity of the entire sentence, which has several points I'm not certain are correct or the best way to phrase. The other question deals with the single word "skull", which I was surprised I couldn't find a cannon term for in Klingon.
Looking at the grammar page on the Klingon Wiki, it seems to be correct.
Hi @anonymoususer, thanks for posting. At its current state, your post isn't enough for an answer - a link could change or break making this answer useless. Additionally, that link points to the main grammar portal of the Klingon Wiki, meaning a reader will need to go over multiple pages and figure out for themselves whether the sentence is correct. Consider expanding this answer - explaining here why the sentence is correct (Linking to specific supporting articles from the wiki would improve the answer, but it should stand on its own).
I intended to post the link as a comment, to provide a resource for the OP, but at the time, I did not have enough reputation to post a comment.
No worries - note that comments should be treated as temporary (mods can and do delete them from time to time) - anything useful/important for anyone reading this answer in a couple of days/months/years should be edited into the answer proper. And, again - don't rely on just links to other sites, provide the relevant details here ([edit] the answer, don't use comments for that ;-) ). It can take time to get used to the way StackExchange sites work, but they are useful exactly because the way they do - consider taking the [tour] if you haven't already.
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2223 | Words for interaction dynamics, specific
How would you construct a word to describe the following scenario:
a person talks to you, in one to one correspondence, between a word (or set of words) said, and a face portrayed
the face, changes, in a step function manner (each face is distinct, and each, face, is distinct, in corresponding to something said
each face, is an engram (it is a picture that takes you back to a past experience
you, interact, as per the past experience
I want a word for this. The word must describe that the dialogue is taken from the broken up process, described, above.
Then, you go somewhere
The entire thing said remains
I want a word for this.
(the, dialogue, ... between, the two people, remains, a bit as being said by the puppet you will next look at, and, a bit, remaining as what you said in the puppet's, thought, cloud).
If, you are, relaxing,
you may portray the dialogue onto the face of a toy you are looking at.
This may result from situations, such as , voidness, fear, or time, passing (even, with medication, lengthening your concentration and inability to act or perceive), and the desire or push, from the empty, to do, something.
I want a name for this.
That is three words, that do not exist, in current languages. Any suggestions would be appropriate.
The past experiences may be with other people. The face, resembles, them.
I am thinking of how to structure this and similar interaction dynamics with vocabulary.
The first word, I suggest, is a "stont".
The second word, is a "strabil".
The third, is a "flaxseen".
But that wouldn't be a very good choice, because it, in, my, mind, derives, from a very, specific... experience, with flax seeds (someone showing them to me, and me saying, it's, not that
It is inappropriate, you may like the flax seeds, but, really... we are taking about something else
Let's call it, "embsimportrayal"
Perhaps I should delete my post.
I'm not sure this question can be answered exactly. As far as I know, no natural language has words this precise, so you have two choices: Either create your own derivational morphology that could produce things like these, or just... make up words that you think sound fitting.
But in fact, your comments suggest you've already done the latter, so now the question is, what do you require help with?
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666 | Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?
I was looking through Wikipedia's Swadesh Lists recently and wondered if there was anything like a Swadesh list for verb infinitives, similar to how Spanish verbs work (to be, to want, to eat, to know, to jump, etc.) or verb meanings. Is there one? What verb infinitives does it contain (what number)?
Do you mean verb meanings? Having non-finite/infinitive forms is not a necessity for a functioning language.
@kaleissin I added that to the question. Thanks for the tip
It's worth noting that there are PLENTY of word frequency lists around, but almost no one ever bothers to even try compiling cross-linguistic ones (for reasons that should be pretty obvious). Lists for English, furthermore, hardly ever even attempt to separate different word categories (again for reasons that ought to be obvious).
The Conlanger Lexipedia is based off a 1500 roots list (with some caveats) compiled from a 1.1 million word corpus of science-fantasy writing. You can count the verbs yourself... once you decide what counts as a verb (the list can't tell apart verb vs. adjective vs. noun uses, and the commoner an English content word, the likelier it is to drift between noun/verb/adjective).
The top 200 words (page 36-37 of the book) have the following roots that are "primarily" verbs:
go, will, know, see, come, like, would, could [end of top 50 words, could is 49]
look, give, seem, must, call, think, make, ask, work, run, mean, may, wear, feel, want, stand, hear, open, should, end, keep, sit, need, turn, move, try, begin, place, close, talk, can, get, take, tell, find, speak, might, let, hold, fall, bring
Be mindful of the biases introduced by an English list: the English auxiliary system, in particular, wouldn't be reproduced in any other languages as the past forms (and very often the main forms!) would be regular verbal inflections instead of separate forms. Arguably, I shouldn't have included the auxiliary verbs at all, really:strictly speaking these verb have no infinitive form to begin with.
@Lostinfrance that should've been "try". Fixed it now
When designing some of my recent attempts at languages, I've used a list of Proto-Indo-European roots (taken from here). Looking at the verbs covered by those roots, you get a good list of verbs which would be important to a pre-literate culture. So while you get verbs like "to paint" (since slapping colour on things is rather old) or "to shop/trade" you don't get verbs like "to write" or "to read".
Obviously this is somewhat culturally biased: someone living in other parts of the world without domesticated animals is unlikely to need a verb for "to domesticate/tame", while the plains/steppe dwelling PIE culture didn't need a verb to describe a long crossing over water ("to sail"), whereas someone from a culture in the South Pacific would. Still, it's a good place to start because it gives you functional verbs that a human society is more than likely to have.
Welcome to Conlang, Keith, and thanks for the answer! You have my +1 for the point about pre-literate cultures. When you have a moment, please take our [tour] and visit the [help]. You may also find [meta] useful. Have fun!
Note that a break down of concepts according to part-of-speech (like verb, noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) does not generalise well over the languages of the world. The amount of verbs—whatever you define them, anyway—can vary to a large degree in natural languages, and adjectives may be completely absent (their role being taken over either by verbs [like the apple reds] or by nouns [the apple's redness]). So asking for a list of verbs already introduces some bias (wanted or unwanted, depending on your design goals) into your conlang design.
It is therefore quite understandable that such lists don't exist.
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733 | What language uses the most amount of phonemes?
I'm constructing an auxlang/artlang (temporarily named Syn).
The Syn is (being) designed to interface with any known human language, with a wildly uniform set of simplistic, unambiguous symbols.
I have almost finished the phonetic alphabet component and have been trying to transliterate several languages into this while translating some that I know now on the side. However, since I'm not a native speaker of any of the transliterations and google translate is becoming not much of a help, I can't pinpoint the exact phonetic equivalent of some words. Now I'm running out of practice scripts from different spoken languages to accurately transliterate. Hence, I think I'm gonna need another language similar to what I'm making.
Are there any languages, written or spoken, natural or constructed, that occupy majority of the entire phonetic alphabet, with as little diacritics, as few ambiguous strokes, and as strict 1-to-1 symbol-phoneme as possible?
"and as strict 1-to-1 morpheme-phoneme as possible" What does this mean? A language that only has single phoneme morphemes? I don't know of any that do that. Do you mean 1-to-1 character to phoneme instead?
@curiousdannii There is Pleistocenese, with indeed roughly 1-to-1 morpheme-phoneme correspondence, however its phonemes are not quite what we call phonemes in current languages.
You're gonna have a hard time with "majority of the entire IPA". Non-pulmonic consonants are rare, and some consonants are hard to contrast (e.g. /β/ vs. /v/), while vowels are often highly allophonic. Natural languages tend to have fewer IPA places and distinction via aspiration, labialization, etc.
My best answer to your question would be Ithkuil (constructed, almost unspeakable language). It has 58 phonemes, with unusually many vowels (13). This allows it to have mostly single phonemes for morphemes. Ithkuil's Roman transliteration is a bit strange, as some phonemes use diacritics and others have digraphs, but it also has its own script (morpho-phonemic with alphabetic characters).
There are many languages with far greater extremes than Ithkuil. Even English has 12-13 monophthongs and 8 or so diphthongs.
Yes, you are right about that. Ithkuil was mainly the answer because of the 1-phoneme-per-morpheme thing. Of course, if you look at characters-per-morpheme in Ithkuil script, the ratio is smaller, while it is larger in the Latin transliteration.
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670 | Is there existing terminology for distinguishing multiple imperative moods?
I have found a conlang, Klyran, which has a rather interesting feature: multiple imperative moods. Quoting from the documentation:
For imperative mood there are number of suffixes that correspond to different sort of request from begging to ordering with threat of killing in case of refusal. These suffixes can be omitted.
(For the case of an suffixless imperative form, a "default" form of the imperative mood is presumed, similar to a real-world imperative in meaning.)
While this part of the language has not been fully fleshed out (nobody yet has bothered to define the various imperative mood affixes) -- is this feature (multiple imperative moods) something that has existing terminology surrounding it?
I don't think there is any really reliable cross-linguistic labelling system that would include all of these. There are terms for most of them, but they're often used for only a few languages, and perhaps not very consistently. For someone who is created a conlang, they have flexibility then to adapt these terms for their language, however the important thing is to clearly describe in detail the full semantics of the language, rather than just assigning labels.
The broad category for all of these is deontic modality, which covers the modality of how the speaker thinks things ought to be. Within deontic modality there are many subtypes. The SIL Glossary has a very useful section giving a hierarchical description of deontic modality.
English actually has a very large number of modal verbs, with subtly different senses, so with examples from English we can illustrate a lot of the subtypes, even though they're usually not given clear labels. The English modals are however very complex, most of them being used in different contexts to mean very different things.
The imperative is actually one of the least marked ways of issuing a directive/command. In English it is a structurally different way of forming a sentence, but in other languages it may have a more regular structure with a particular verb form that fits into a wider affix paradigm.
Should is usually weaker than the imperative, giving a recommendation. Possible labels include hortative and propositive.
Have to, need to and must can all be stronger than the imperative, but they also often imply that the person giving the instruction needs to plead to some extent with those they are instructing; an autocratic dictator would never tell their servants that they need to do something, they would simply tell them to do it (with an imperative sentence.) Labels include precative for requests, and directive and obligative for commands that emphasise obligation.
When will or shall are emphasised and stressed in English they are used to indicate a serious instruction, which sometimes sound almost sinister with an implied threat for those who disregard them: "You will do this... (or else!)" The label commissive is used for threats, but not exclusively, as it's also used for promises.
The distinction between "should" and "shall" can be clearly seen in legal terminology, especially in contract law. If an obligation is indicated with "should", it's treated almost as optional, and not doing it typically will not put them in breach. If an obligation is indicated as "shall" then they must carry out the obligation or be penalized or in breach of contract. "You should not use the company credit card for personal expenses" means it's discouraged. "You shall not use the company credit card for personal expenses" means your employment is on the line.
@KeithMorrison While you're spot-on, I wouldn't say legal terminology is the best place to take cues from when it comes to interpreting everyday English. A lot of words have much more specific, unchangeable definitions in legalese.
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1506 | Are words based on acronyms treated differently when the language changes over time?
Do sound and grammar changes affect acronyms, that can be pronounced as words, differently than other words in a language?
Are words based on acronyms treated differently or not when sound/grammar changes evolve?
more immune to the sound changes that the rest of the language undergoes.
not immune but more resistant (taking longer before being treated like any other word).
treated exactly the same from the get go.
dependant on the language/s in question and as such, do what you want as long as you are consistent.
I want to figure out if I need to make special exceptions, or not, for words in my conlangs that are originally based on acronyms.
For example, English acronyms that can be pronounced as words:
LiDar
Sonar
fubar
Nato
Noaa (I've always internally pronounced it "noah", but a quick Google search says other people may pronounce it phonetically)
Not so much English acronyms that you still pronounce out loud phonetically:
eg
wtf
gis
It depends on the word in question. Not that many English speakers would recognise laser as an acronym, so it has effectively become a 'normal' word. And it can be inflected, as in She was lasering away that old tattoo.
It is different for acronyms that are spelled all in upper case, I think; NATO is kind of 'frozen' in that respect, and I doubt it will ever undergo the same process as laser.
In the past, SPQR was a common acronym, but I don't know of any acronyms that morphed into words, so it is difficult to give any historical examples regarding sound changes.
I would make a distinction between 'word-like' acronyms (radar, laser, ...) and clear abbreviations (NATO), and treat the former like other words, but keep the latter fixed. It can also depend on what the acronym describes: a tool (laser) is different in applicability from a group of countries (Benelux). You can't easily turn the latter into a verb.
Regarding the need to be consistent: you don't need to. Languages are not logical, they evolve. There is no requirement to be consistent at all. Have as many irregularities and exceptions as you like!
Regarding laser specifically, I've actually heard (and used) the back-formed verb "to lase", probably in analogy with "taser", another lexified acronym.
I heard lase long before there was Taser, but in the sense ‘behave as a laser’ (“any gas can lase”) rather than ‘use a laser’.
Acronyms are, for the most part, a relatively recent phenomenon (as they make the most sense with a high level of literacy), and so it's hard to really look at what's happened in natural languages.
Prior to the modern era, we have a small number of initialisms (e.g. SPQR), but as these do not seem to be pronounced as words in their own they're not a good point of reference. They also don't seem to have remained in continuous use, also limiting their usefulness.
An exception to this is Hebrew. The Jewish community has had a high of literacy for a long time, and many acronyms have been attested since the Middle Ages or earlier (e.g. Tanach "Hebrew Bible" < TNK < Torah 'Instruction', Neviʾim 'Prophets', and Ketuvim 'Writings'). Unfortunately to my knowledge, none of the sound changes to Hebrew since these acronyms are first attested would have affected them, and so we can't actually see if they behaved like normal words or not.
My hunch would be that acronyms would behave like normal words (at least in the short/medium term), but also be more liable to spelling pronunciations.
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622 | Teaching children constructed languages
Are there any modern accounts (either of personal experiences of individuals on this forum, or in general) of an individual creating their own language and teaching it to their child(ren)/family?
If I remember right, the founder of Lojban used the language at home. I am not sure whether the children picked up the language.
One guy taught his daughter Volapuk.
There is a contemporary case of someone teaching their kids their personal conlang, she used to be active on one of Facebook's conlang groups.
The revived languages, Cornish, Hebrew, Sanskrit, have similar dynamics to conlangs. Having government support in the form of schools and day care works wonders for the project being successful.
Getting a child to speak your languages takes time (20+ hours a week) of exposure, and it really helps to have a community of peers who also speak that language, or a child's decision to keep using their parents language will be personal and idiosyncratic. I get this impression from people I've met who tried speaking Arabic or Icelandic to their kids in the US where they got plenty of exposure to their parents, but no particular supporting community of peers.
There's a pretty badly written account (English translation) of someone's children learning Arka, though I have no idea if it's true.
There's also the better-known case of d'Armond Speers teaching his kid Klingon.
Edit: the author of the first article later confirmed that it was a hoax.
If this is a hoax, is there any value in keeping it here and linking to it?
Not really, but I didn't know that it was when I posted this answer.
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1522 | Do I need to start with a phonology when creating a new conlang?
The few conlangs I've read about/watched being developed in videos (such as those by Biblaridion) either started with phonology, or the description begins that way.
Whether that's a representative sample or not, is there a benefit to starting with phonology, especially when making a natural conlang?
It feels like an easier thing to add in later, vs. things like grammar.
NO.
Videos and how to books often present a cookie cutter method of language construction. There is nothing wrong with this at all. Except that it leads many people to a) follow the recipe and b) get stuck on phonology.
The truth is we can start working on a new language anywhere. We can start with phonology or grammar or syntax. I often start with poetry. The other truth is that there is no particular benefit to the glossopoet or to the language maker of starting in one place over another.
There is at least one conlang that I am aware of (Rikchik) that does not have a phonology because it is used by an alien species that does not speak.
@JeffZeitlin -- I remember Rikchik from the Long Ago.
You don't have to start there. But it is a convenient place to start; it's hard to create words or grammar if there's nothing to make them concrete. If I have a phonology, I can start creating words and then short sentences. If I don't have a phonology, I can't create words without creating some sort of phonology; "london" and "rover" and "fog" imply an l-r contrast and nasals and fricatives and plosive and some sort of voicing or aspiration distinction. If you want to have a reasonable Latin orthography, you either have to change the words or accept a phonology consistent with that. If you don't have a phonology or words, grammar is a lot more figurative; "plurals are indicated by an s on nouns and a lack of an s on verbs" implies you have an s in your phonology and that noun + "s" is reasonable for your phonology. Starting with phonology leaves everything else a blank slate; starting somewhere else is going to create a lot of phonology implicitly.
I think if I am not as focused on phonology I'm fine to create it implicitly
Not to mention that "accepted" sounds change over time and/or region. The sounds may not be the consistent thing in the language.
@PipperChip Compare the phonology of English and German, two languages separated by a couple thousand years. Sounds aren't that inconsistent over even a long period. If you're an English speaker and create a phonology implicitly, it's likely to be English phonology, possibly without as many vowels, as the English writing system is most ambiguous about vowels.
@prosfilaes Even with such a close relationship, how these languages use the sounds is still very different!
@prosfilaes - Point taken, but Modern English and (modern) German aren't separated by more than about a thousand years; it's less than a thousand years since Old English was contaminated into Middle English, and Old English is very definitely closely related to (then-)contemporary German/Gothic.
You don't have to start there, but it is a good place to start. What often tends to happen if you don't start with phonology is that you will default to the phonology of your native language, perhaps with an additional "weird sound" or two thrown in if you try hard.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. That said, if you don't set your phonology at the beginning, it's very hard to make changes later. Everything else you build about your language will use your implied phonology, which again, is likely to be the same as your personal native language's phonology with minor changes.
No, you don't. However, it may be easier to start with phonology, especially when you don't have specific features you want your language to have. If you do have features you do want in your language, you can think about the sound changes that could lead to those features and work backward to figure out what phonology would have led to those changes. Biblaridion actually does this in his Conlang Case Study series
You do still need to come up with the phonology early on.
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902 | Would these features be naturalistic in this scenario?
Background
I am planning a naturalistic Goidelic language which shall have quite an influence from Old Norse – probably at least 1/4 or 1/3 of the vocabulary to be of North Germanic origin, as well as a mostly undecided, but lesser influence on the phonology and grammar. Despite the North Germanic influence, I would still like to retain a ‘broad-slender’ vowel system, lenition, eclipsis, and (possibly) prothesis.
Also, although I intend for the Old Norse influence to be less focused on grammar, I came up with the idea of, instead of deriving from the Old Irish definite article in and having it work similarly to the other Goidelic languages, I could derive from the Old Norse clitic article -inn and instead use this style of clitic article.
Questions
Would the retention of broad-slender vowels and consonant mutations be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?
Would the replacement of the Goidelic definite article with an Old Norse-style clitic definite article be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?
As an extension to this question – would it be realistic to retain the different Old Norse articles for the different genders (-inn for masculine nom., -in for feminine nom., and -it for neuter nom.) as well as the different cases (for example, -innar for feminine genitive singular) or to just keep one or two articles (such as to just derive from -inn for all the definite articles in my language), regardless of the gender or case?
Thank you in advance.
Yes, the whole thing looks naturalistic.
ad 1) When you assimilate the Old Norse words to a Goidelic phonetic system, lenitions and broad/slender distinctions come in very naturally. It will be more difficult when you insist on some Old Norse sounds sticking out of the Goidelic system; they can form exceptions to the lenition rules or evolve specific lenitions of their own.
ad 2) Retaining the Old Norse suffixed article is definitely an option, and simplifying it to only one form (independent of gender, case, and number) looks most natuaral to me, but keeping the inflected forms is also covered by your artistic license as a conlang author. Or you may inflect the definite forms according to Goidelic inflectional rules.
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852 | How could a conlang enforce subjective idealism in a constructed world
Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.
How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?
My guess is that its semantic primes should consist of:
qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.
A pronoun like *I* to refer to one's self
Verbs such as *think*, *believe*, *know*
Adverbs such as: *now*, *before*, *after*
Objects (e.g. chair, table, etc.), other personal pronouns (you, he, etc.), matter and all the other things that do not really exist (in the view of subjective idealism) would be defined as paraphrases.
Edit: Note that this is not a question on subjective idealism in reality, but about subjective idealism in a constructed world. Therefore arguments against subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant.
A speaker of your language cannot utter the equivalent sentence to "everything that exists is made of matter, including our own thoughts"? Why would that be? Or is it the case that the equivalent of such sentence would be necessarily agrammatical? How would that be possible?
@LuísHenrique The word "matter" would not be a semantic prime and there would be no way to define it.
We can have two classes of nouns: souls, and the perceptions and ideas of souls. Ideas nouns must be inflected for who they are being perceived by: you, God, or whoever. This would have the effect of turning a sentence like "The dog is red" into "The dog seems red to me."
Secondly, instead of saying "The dog…" or "There is a dog…", you would say "I have the idea of a dog that…" Then to refer to that dog again, instead of using a pronoun like "it", you could say something like "my aforementioned dog idea". Idea nouns could exist only in a sort of object case, and not as a subject, to make speaking about it directly as if it really existed out there ungrammatical.
While someone could speak in such a manner, how do you propose the conlang force them to?
It would be ungrammatical to speak of objects without stating what soul is perceiving them. Of course, people can speak ungrammatically, and the vocabulary and grammar of the language might shift, and there's nothing much we can do about that. But I think what is possible is to have a language that is most naturally expressed with this philosophy in mind.
You may be interested in E-Prime.
E-Prime is a version of English that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. This makes many objective statements like "Roses are red" impossible. Instead a person is required to use more subjective constructions like "Roses appear red to me".
Basically, your question is misstated.
In our own world, languages cannot enforce philosophies. You can be a Hegelian, a Tomist, a Berkelian, or a Marxist, in any given language, from Modern English to Ancient Farsi.
After all, all languages have this pesky word, "no", so that anything that can be affirmed can also be negated.
In a constructed world, everything is possible - negation of entropy, FTL travel, and all kinds of magic. So in your constructed world, language makes impossible for people to follow any other philosophy than subjective idealism. How language does this? It is better not to explain it, or only do it through applied phlebotinum - like SF writers do when describing FTL travel or the nature of mana.
I suggest this fiction, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luís Borges; it might be somewhat similar to - though somewhat more disquieting than - what you intend.
So you disagree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
@Bob - Yes, I do. But that is a too complex issue to discuss on comments, and too off-topic to go in the answer. Anyway, in your fictional universe, it is true, just like in other fictional universes FTL travel is possible. Its validity or lack thereof in the real world shouldn't be of concern, as long as you can coherently manage your fiction within the idea that it is true.
Sapir-Whorf is demonstrably wrong, at least in its strong form, and the popular understanding of it is based on urban legends like the "Inuit have X number of words for snow" idea which is itself based on a misunderstanding of linguistics and how languages work.
Look into the way Sanskrit works, and the words they use when discussing Hindu doctrines. I read somewhere that the Sanskrit word for meat, "Mamsa", is a word containing the words for "Me" and "You", referencing that as you kill and eat an animal, you will become an animal in a future lifetime that who you killed will hunt and eat.
The theological/metaphysical statement is right there in a common statement - So the implications of subjective idealism would have to be used to describe phenomena from the most accurate perspective of the worldview.
Revised answer:
There is a maxim of geopoesy: who makes the world makes the rules.
In a secondary world, a world of your own devising, an invented language would not need to "enforce" subjective idealism at all. Only one thing is required, and that is to "set the dial" of your subcreation to subjective idealism.
In that world, only the mind and mental constructs have true existence. The language a mind devises for itself to communicate (within itself) and assuming the mind that exists is a human mind, will arise to describe its experience.
I think your semantic primes would probably be sufficient to describe both the realia of the mind-being's existence: the 1s pronoun, the concrete verbs such as "think", "know" and "believe", the qualia of phantasms created within the mind. Because sunsets and wine do not exist.
If the world you subcreate is, in actuality, a typological copy of the primary world, where things outside the mind have actual existence, then you run into the exact same issues I dealt with when your question was about the primary world itself.
Such a language, I hold, would not be able to "enforce" subjective idealism in any meaningful way. It would not be able to overcome the steak and eggs problem.
Original response to unedited query (regarding subjective idealism within the primary world) retained for historical purposes:
Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.
How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?
A very interesting thought experiment! But I believe is simply not practicable.
I don't think a language of any kind will be able to enforce that kind of (quite silly) perspective of reality.
In order to pull it off, I think you would have to first, absolutely and positively convince yourself that Berkeley was a) on to something and b) that a) is The Something.
Now, reason and common sense inform us that things do actually exist. Things outside the mind, things outside of mental construct. I can sit my weary bones down on a chair and be thankful that chairs exist. They're not mental constructs. They're articles of furniture made of wood and designed and built to be sat in. That's reason and common sense refuting Berkeley.
Now, I had a look at Mr Berkeley's picture in that article. He looks pretty well fed to me. Not emaciated, not dehydrated. I'll just bet he enjoyed a good steak and eggs for breakfast!
A true subjective idealist would also have to be a practical breatharian, because food does not exist. It's an insubstantial construct of the mind.
For your language to really function, you too would have to become a breatharian. You know: immerse yourself in the culture! Let us know how far you get in the practical application of this kind of philosophical language!
Specific to your last point re objects: I think, since objects do not exist and are therefore irrelevant to the thought and being of the mind, you could probably get away with a language where all substantives (apart from the 1s) are reduced to a single pronominal stem.
Trees don't exist, so you wouldn't really need a word for "tree". I don't exist, so you don't need a word for "elemtilas". This post doesn't exist, so you don't need words for "stack exchange" or "invented language" or "post" or "forum".
My question is not about subjective idealism in reality, but subjective idealism in a constructed world. Although interesting, your arguments about subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant here. I edit my question to clarify this point.
If Berkeley were able to enjoy steak and eggs while positing subjective idealism, that just proves that subjective idealism doesn't require breatharianism to be tenable
@ba It also indicates that he doesn't accept subjective idealism as a viable mode of existence!
@Bob -- I see you've edited to alter the nature of the query. I answered under the assumption that you were trying to enforce sub-id. in the primary world. In this new circumstance, all answers reduce to you make the world --- you make the rules!
@Bob -- also note that it is acceptable practice to answer queries in the negative or to address the fundamentals surrounding a premise. Therefore, arguments about subjective realism are entirely relevant to the question.
@elemtilas This is an interesting answer indeed.
I can only hope I offered a substantive response to an actually extremely interesting query! The truth is: philosophical invented languages are rare. I've only ever come across two glossopoets working on them. And none of them have worked on a language for such a radical philosophy. Whether or not you subscribe to the philosophy, kudos for working on it!
@elemtilas That's only if you conflate subjective idealism with breatharianism, which Berkeley (who should be the authority on it) evidently didn't
@ba --- Perhaps not. That just means he didn't find his philosophical proposition reasonable. Even without breatharianism, all B. would have to do is stub is toe or be be bitten by a dog to be reminded that there are things outside the mind that have substantial reality. But that's probably getting us even farther away from the topic at hand.
If you think about it, many existing languages do, albeit in a limited manner. In Spanish, for example, all nouns and pronouns are gendered; either male or female. This enforces the idea that all people are either male or female—which is not true. Your world might have two groups of people and the second group can only be described as 'inferiors' in the language; there is no other word.
But when there's no good word, people will borrow one from another language, or make up a new one. Changing grammar is harder, but that happens too. Or the sense of an existing word will change.
Really? Many existing languages do enforce subjective idealism?
I assume that the inhabitants of your constructed world are humans (or at least have comparable minds to humans).
The is a famous hypothesis in lingusitics, called Linguisitc Relativity or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that claims (to different degrees) that the language shapes the mind and the world view. Experimental studies only show weak effects, if any. We can assume that humans are able to develop every thought in any language.
On the other hand, authors have used this to some effect in fiction writing—in a constructed fictional world you have the licence to do so and to ignore hard science.
How would I do so in fiction writing in a manner that is plausible?
If anything else fails, use magic. Just let your society be true believers of Linguisitc Relativity and let the belief system work out ... try it and see how far it can carry you.
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883 | What symbols should I use for phonemes when I have many vowels?
Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA symbols:
Front | Back
---------|----------
[i] | [u]
[y] |
---------|---------
[e] | [o]
[ø] |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] |
[œ] |
---------|---------
[a] | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃] | [õ]
[ã] |
My keyboard only allows me to type àâäùûüèêëéìîï but not œɛɑø or the diacritics used in the IPA for nasal vowels and diphthongs.
(EDIT: Note that my question really is all about the transliteration I'll be using for practical typing. Sure, I can just use fancy unicode symbols for my actual writing system in the end if I want to, but copypasting symbols isn't very practical for writing long texts.)
The language uses a (very simplified) subset of Quebec French for sound inventory, but I wanted to avoid using too many digraphs or diacritics which French relies on heavily. I know I can always come up with a custom font and writing system later on which brings in more glyphs for vowels, but I need something practical to use during conception.
I'd be interested if you have a generic answer as to what your own process is when you have a similar problem or a specific suggestion in my case.
My incomplete solution for now is this (updated to include jknappen's suggestion which I like for the German-style umlaut). I could add a macro to my text editor to allow for tildes, but I still need to figure out how I want to distinguish [œ] and [e] or [a] and [ɑ].
Front | Back
---------|----------
[i] /i/ | [u] /u/
[y] /ü/ |
---------|---------
[e] | [o] /o/
[ø] /ö/ |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] /ä/ |
[œ] |
---------|---------
[a] /a/ | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃] | [õ]
[ã] |
You can use a compose key application (e.g., WinCompose) which lets you type a symbol like ɛ with Compose key + e + h.
I ended up using the following:
Front | | Back
---------|----------|-----------
[i] /i/ | | [u] /u/
[y] /ü/ | |
---------|----------|-----------
[e] /e/ | | [o] /o/
[ø] /ë/ | | [õ] /õ/
---------|----------|-----------
[aɛ̯] /á/ | |
[œ] /œ/ | |
[œ̃] /ĩ/ | |
---------|----------|-----------
| [a] /a/ | [ɑː] /aa/
| [ɑ̃] /ã/ |
Many vowel variants were written using something similar to the German umlaut following jknappen's recommendation.
ĩ, ã, õ and œ were chosen because they work in many fonts and are close to their IPA representation. I set up an AutoHotkey script to allow typing them easily.
I really didn't want to introduce a diacritic to represent [ɑ], so I just made that sound longer so it makes sense to represent it with /aa/. This will make it easier to tell apart too.
Update: After reading the beginning of Mark Rosenfelder's LCK again, his warning about the same diacritic having more than one meaning made me realize using an umlaut for the diphthong [aɛ̯] was not right, so I chose to replace that with á, which makes it much easier to remember.
Update: I decided to move the umlaut from ö to ë and to represent [œ̃] with ĩ. These are debatable choices, but I like how it means I now have only one possible diacritic for each glyph, except for <a> which can have either a tilde to indicate nasalization or an accent for the diphthong.
This looks like a pretty good orthography to me but I would have done some things differently: 1. You use the diaeresis in ü for fronting but ë for rounding (the same diacritic with 2 meanings). 2. The letter i stands for /i/ but ĩ stands for /œ̃/? 3. I would have used a digraph for a diphthong
@ba There might be place for improvement for the diaeresis indeed, but I think you're confused about [œ] which is a single vowel and not a diphthong. See this video for an example of how they are pronounced.
/aɛ̯/ is the diphthong
Looking back, I guess I didn't understand the concept of fronting and rounding when I read your comment. I've since greatly simplified the number of vowels in my language so it's no longer an issue, but you had a good point.
One possibility is to use German-style umlauts, i.e., ü for /y/, ö for /ø/, and ä for /æ/; you can keep the symbol œ for /œ/. I'd recommend against having both ae and œ in the writing system because of confusability. The choice of tilde for nasalisation is a good one, IMO. The most problematic case are the two different kinds of a-sounds, but there are some African languages just going with a and ɑ (and there is also an uppercase letter for the ɑ in Unicode, it is named Latin Alpha). All the symbols are readily available in Unicode and should not pose insurmountable difficulties in text processing.
I didn't think it made sense because in French that symbol is used as a diaeresis, indicating separation between vowels that otherwise would form a digraph, but if German uses it to indicate a change in vowel sound then I guess it could work! Plus doing so with ü would solve another problem, where I can use y to represent its English equivalent.
In Swedish, å, ä and ö are separate letters - with their own single keys on a Swedish keyboard, and their own place in the alphabet. Y is also used for /y/, as a vowel, so there are nine letters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y, å, ä, ö). Swedish distinguishes between short and long vowels, so e.g. one letter (like ö) is used for both /øː/ (long) and /œ/ (short).
On my computer I have a custom keyboard setup that allows me to enter all sorts of combining diacritics. This allows you to make combinations that are usually not present, including multiple diacritics on the same letter. The only downside to this is that they do not render well in some fonts. I'll give some examples of what I can do with my keyboard setup.
umlaut with a: ä
circumflex with e: ê
macron over u: ū
acute and under ring with o: ó̥
caron above and below i: ǐ̬
There are a lot of options, see the wikipedia page I linked above for all of the different options. To type them you just need to press ctrl-alt with whatever you assign the key to.
Thanks for sharing that software, but people seem to be having trouble with it on Windows 10. Besides, it's probably less tedious to set up automatic replacements within Word or other text editors. It's what I'm thinking of doing for /œ/.
I was able to use that software on windows 10, though it is no longer strictly supported. It is hit or miss
If anyone is wondering, I ended up using autohotkey for /œ/ and /õ/. It's very easy to set up and turn on when I want to start working on my conlang.
I've thought about re-purposing some letters which have vowel-like properties. For example, the letter /w/ can sometimes be arm-wrestled into a vowel-like state. Then there's /r/, which is almost like a schwa sometimes, and /n/, which sometimes sounds like... well, like a nasalized null vowel-like thing...
It's often not great, but it's okay.
I know you mentioned being constrained, but unicode has letters in other alphabets that could help. Cyrillic for example has letters that might be re-useful.
Welsh actually uses "w" as a vowel - for /u/, with "u" for a vowel that was once /ʉ/ but has since unrounded to /ɨ/ or even /i/.
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931 | Can Root Words Be Derived From Other Root Words
If I said "I" was "Zha" would it be plausible to say "you" is "Zho" and from there naturally begin forming grammatical gender, or would that be too early in the language to add complexities? Also, could the word "we" not be a root word but instead be derived from "I" (Zha->Zhasa)?
Sure. And like always, real languages got there first.
In Quechua, for instance, fist person singular ("I/me") is Ñuqa. 1st person plural inclusive (we, all of us) is Ñuqanchik, and exclusive (us, but not you) is Ñuqayku.
Second person singular is Qam, plural Qamkuna. Third person singular is Pay, third person plural Paykuna. -kuna is simply the Quechuan plural suffix. "House" is wasi, "houses" wasikuna.
"You, the person I'm talking to" Qam, "You, the people I'm talking to" Qamkuna.
It's quite common in many languages that "I" and "you" are distinct; after all, I'm usually the most most important person in the universe, and you just live there. Third person pronouns seem to often be derived from pointing words: "that thing over there" becomes "that person over there".
It looks to me that I, you, and he/she are typically not derived from one another. So Zha "I" might typically be quite different from the word for "You". But beyond that, inflecting these base pronouns is certainly fair game.
English I and you, for example, are unique as far back as we can go (Proto Indo European).
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934 | Structure only conlang? Nouns?
Are there examples of conlangs that are used by applying their structure such as grammar, sentence structure, intonation, means of combining words, etc… with other features of a given language or given member of a class of languages?
This has the disadvantage that for understanding one would have to know both the language in question, call this X, and the language it's adapting, call this Y.
For example and in particular I'm thinking that X could use the alphabet and all the single morpheme nouns and verbs of Y, but replace every other aspect of the language with its own.
A possible advantage could be in allowing the speaker more reachable access to an unfamiliar linguistic environment, be that a conlang or a natural language, where different modes of thought are the most natural.
Thanks for the changes. However it's not asking the right thing now. I'll put in an edit keeping as many of your changes intact as possible.
It happens with sign languages - often there are two "versions" of a sign language, the first one (less official, natural) is generally used by the community and has its own grammar, the second one (more official, heavily constructed) parallels grammar (syntax) of the corresponding spoken language.
E.g.there is the natural Polish Sign Language, and a rather artificial constructed Signed Polish, following closely the syntax of spoken Polish, so somewhat the opposite of the question, a natural language imposing its grammar over the conlang. But it could be said that the signing system (obviously) imposes its own "phonology" over the spoken language.
Interesting :) As you say it flips the question on it's head, sort of the opposite, providing it's own nouns and verbs rather than providing it's own grammar etc…
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944 | How to describe a purely symbolic writing system?
Before I jump headlong into constructing a language, I'd like to do some research and see what others have done before me and learn from their experiences/mistakes. The keywords I'm currently using are sub-optimal, so I need help tightening them up.
The "communication method" I am thinking of:
is purely for reading and writing
has no need to be spoken and is thus not based upon letters/phonemes
uses symbols to represent concepts
each symbol/concept corresponds to something like an English word or sentence (e.g. 'a cat', 'the sound made by flying bees', 'the feeling that results from being beaten by a lesser foe', 'move quickly', 'why?')
symbols are arranged relative to each other (in 2D space) to communicate more complex concepts and provide context
symbols are highly domain-specific and exclusive — mining, carpentry, fishing, etc. would have exclusive symbols that only have meaning in their contexts
is not meant to be signed, hummed, whistled, grunted, tapped or transmitted in any other way except for being printed on, and read from, a two-dimensional surface
is not based on any existing language
would permit deaf people, and people with no common language, to collaborate on very specific tasks
Wikipedia defines pasigraphy as 'a writing system where each written symbol represents a concept (rather than a word or sound or series of sounds in a spoken language)' but also defines a writing system as "any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication". That seems a bit contradictory and confusing.
What are some good/accurate keywords that describe this 'thing' I am trying to develop?
This reminds me of the Hexagony and related 2D esolangs :)
I think you're overthinking this a little. While what you're considering is unusual, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't just be a written language in a logographic script.
is purely for reading and writing
has no need to be spoken and is thus not based upon letters/phonemes
is not meant to be signed, hummed, whistled, grunted, tapped or transmitted in any other way except for being printed on, and read from, a two-dimensional surface
It has no need to be, sure. But if humans or human-like beings are there they would most likely develop an oral way of "reading" it eventually.
uses symbols to represent concepts
each symbol/concept corresponds to something like an English word or sentence (e.g. 'a cat', 'the sound made by flying bees', 'the feeling that results from being beaten by a lesser foe', 'move quickly', 'why?')
symbols are highly domain-specific and exclusive — mining, carpentry, fishing, etc. would have exclusive symbols that only have meaning in their contexts
Sounds like a logographic writing system. Now it's not clear if the symbols for phrases are made up of component symbols for the things they represent or are unique singular symbols. Building symbols from other symbols would make sense, otherwise the number of symbols would grow exponentially.
symbols are arranged relative to each other (in 2D space) to communicate more complex concepts and provide context
This is on the surface the biggest difference between your proposal and human languages, which for both spoken and written language are linear.
However consider that some branches of linguistics believe that all language is representable by binary trees alone. If your language has a syntax (and if it doesn't it really couldn't be considered language) then we'd expect that it would be possible to develop a tree-based representation of it, perhaps using multiple levels of deep structure below the surface. And a non-binary tree could be converted to a binary tree.
I just spent some time looking at 2D languages, both conlangs and programming languages, and all the ones I found consisted of linear paths to follow or a tree structure. Conlangger Sai has explained their ideas for a non-linear fully 2D writing system, but they don't give an example of such a writing system. But they do say that their version of non-linearity is distinguished from linear design systems only by inelegance or convolution. I'd take this to mean that actually it is serialisable (and therefore could in theory be spoken) if not by humans then by some being of great intelligence. The essay is worth reading anyway if this topic continues to interest you.
In fact, I believe I can say that it is not possible, short of crippled or very simple specialty cases, to directly convert a linear writing to a non-linear one without either loosing a lot of meaning (NLàL), being extremely inelegant by virtue of failing to take advantage of better design (LàNL), or becoming functionally incomprehensible (e.g. the list format in which an Nth-degree array is stored in the C programming language).
So, what is non-linearity?
At its core, NL has to do with how concepts are arranged, both on physical paper and in their more abstract form. A NL system is a multigraph; its components are, or can be, extremely interconnected. There is no single traversal method, though there may be some conventional ones. There may not be a ‘traversal’ method at all, as such;
I'm not concerned if it can be expressed orally — I just want to expressly exclude phonetics from the design process — see what doors a 'clean break' opens up. "logographic writing system" — thanks, I'll investigate that. Yes, building symbols from other symbols is allowed — desirable, even.
@Tim It would be worth looking at the natural language logographic scripts to see what they wrote phonetically. At the very least names would be hard. Maybe your language wouldn't have any true names, but you'd still need a way to distinguish symbols used as an identifier from their normal meanings.
Just finished reading Sai's article — it's a gold-mine! Very dense, though. I'll have to do more research and read it a few more times to fully understand it. Modern logographic systems are too heavily influenced by alphabets/phonetics — they just confuse me with minutae; Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, however, are getting closer to what I had in mind. Personal identifiers are already sorted. Haven't gotten to the point of considering data structures for it yet.
@Tim It's worth noting that that article is quite old now and Sai has gone on to develop a non-linear writing system like you are describing called Unker Non-Linear Writing System.
@Tim What you're describing is a ideographic/pictographic writing system. Chinese/Japanese could be an example as could something like Mayan or any other Native American cave drawings.The latter are mostly if not all pictographic, meaning they are pictures of what they represent. The others contain a mixture of elements: ideographic (abstract) & sometimes syllabic. Mayan is mostly syllabic, but there is a Mayan-esque script for toki pona called "sitelen sitelen" that isn't syllabic at all.
I have a lot to say on this subject, as I've been working on such a project for 30 years.
The terms vary, but "pasigraphy" is one of the terms, as you mentioned. "Ideographic writing" or "ideography" is another term; and "realle carracter" (various spellings) is a 1600's term. LaVan Martineau claimed that Native American rock-writing was a non-sound-based writing; he used the term "pictography" for this. And don't forget "hieroglyphic writing".
I was initially inspired by Francis Lodwick's (various spellings) A Common Writing..." of 1647. Blissymbols (mentioned above) is one of the more fleshed-out projects; but there are others. John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character... was a classificatory system, similar to the Dewey Decimal System, with abstract symbols assigned to the classifiers. Other projects: Pictopen by Juan Garay, Locos by Yukio Ota, Unideo by Eric Cattelain, Book from the Ground by Bing Xu, IRC (International Realle Carracter) by me.
Good stuff! The IRC link from your webpage (http://paulnew.com/1.html) seems to be broken, unfortunately.
Thanks, Tim. I just updated the broken link. I appreciate you reminding me of that. Let me know if the new link doesn't work. (You may have to download, depending on which browser you use.) -- Paul
Your "2D" system sounds rather like old-fashioned sentence diagramming or Frege's Begriffschrift, using specific types of connectors for specific relationships. I should think just running out of room to put more words in the correct spatial relationships to express complex ideas would be a problem.
There is such a natural written language. Chinese. One reason that Chinese is not based on pronunciation is that there are a lot of local dialects that sounds very different from the official mandarin. The Chinese characters are pronounced in a certain way in mandardin but totally different in say cantonese.
Complex characters are built from smaller radicals, and make use of 2d arrangements. (Forest = three tree radicals spread out).
Written Chinese fulfills basically all your points, except perhaps that it is based on an existing language (mandardin, but perhaps one might say that mandarin is based on the written language, or that these co-evolved).
Chinese is not purely logographic however. Which is fine! It's just not what the OP was after.
I read the very few Chinese words, that I know how to write, in English. There's nothing about them that demands they be pronounced a certain way. Japanese and Korean demonstrate this by having integrated Chinese characters into their writings (with on- and kun- pronunciations). However, Ancient or Classical Chinese would be a closer fit because modern Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese, likely the others as well) have many multi-syllable words that don't make sense when broken down into individual characters.
Each language that has adopted Chinese writing has adapted it for their own purposes as well. It's most obvious with languages that are totally unrelated to Chinese, like Japanese. But it is also seen with Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese. These changes are inevitable in any actively used language, written or spoken. Suppose OP's hypothetical writing system exists. If it were adopted for use by real people with different spoken languages and cultures, it would change, much as Chinese has.
Perhaps you are looking for Blissymbols. According to Wikipedia:
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) ... [who] wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, with which he became familiar at Shanghai.
To add a completely different answer, which certainly is constructed, but might not really be classified as a language as such, but it still conveys meaning in a non-verbal fashion: formulas in mathematics.
Equations, and logical statements can be conveyed in this fashion.
I think for example proofs in Euclidean geometry can be presented entirely without English words, and be perfectly understandable by a mathematician. Proofs are "pictorial" (using symbols for rather abstract concepts), and the figures used to present related ideas are 2-dimensional.
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951 | Can you use possessive indicators on pronouns that already have a possessive version of itself in Dovahzul?
In Dovahzul, you can show possession by using se, do, ro, or dro. However, the pronouns already have possessive versions of themselves (e.g. You goes to Your).
Would something like hisedok/hi do dok work instead of hin dok?
In English You's rather than Your wouldn't be grammatically correct, and Dovahzul is remarkably similar to English, but there may be an exception to this.
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1103 | How many words should I create in a conlang?
Question 1: How many words are minimal for a naturalistic conlang? (1000, 1500, 3000 or even more)
Question 2: How many words do the conlangers usually create?
760 is the average conlang word amount (tell me if I’m wrong)
Let's start with some numbers: Esperanto started with 900 radicals (which is different from the number of words that can be formed from that radicals) while Interlingua debuted with a dictionary containing the impressive number of 27000 words. The last number is surely very much on the upper end for a conlang creation, one tenth of it is more realistic.
So a realistic starting number for a not too schematic language (e.g., avoiding something like the Esperanto prefix mal- as an obligatory tool to construct an antonym) would lie in the region of 2000 words including some derivational morphology.
I don't have statistics on how many words conlangers create on average, but there are certainly some conlang enthusiasts out there who just love to create words and to give them etymologies (based on the real world or fictional ones). Those enthusiasts may create very rich constructed vocabularies.
At the other extreme is toki pona with 120 words, which might not be suitable for a dissertation in astrophysics, but seems to work for basic conversations.
The answer to both of these questions lies somewhere between "it depends" and "let's speculate a little".
The act of inventing a naturalistic language does not necessarily mean that you must also create a naturalistically large lexicon. After all, it's the grammar, the syntax, the usability in a wide variety of normal contexts that determines naturalism. A natural language might have anywhere between 15000 and 1,000,000 words. And as you can see from the several English entries, there's not even a consensus as to how many words there are in a language. The number of words you should create is entirely up to you. A more interesting question, interesting in the broad sense of course!, is how many words is enough words to create? This is not only more interesting to consider, but also harder to answer because there is no pat response and any answer given will be purely opinion.
I'd argue that 2000 is a bare bones lower estimation, given that this is the lexicon size for Basic English. But B.E. isn't exactly "naturalistic", so that figure is undoubtedly low. Somewhere between 3000 and 6000 gives you a little more than dry bones to gnaw on!, but still hardly approaches the naturalism of a natural language, to say nothing of the works of the more gung ho kind of lexicophilic glossopoets!
As for the second question, we do have some recent figures. The results of a recent survey of language inventors determined a spread of approximately 500 (+/-) to >5,000 over 246 respondents. Of note are the lowest and highest categories, with about 70% of respondents falling into the <500 & >5000 categories. The remaining 30% fall between 500 and 5000 words.
It seems to be impossible to create 50k words, ain't it? Maybe using a computer, you can write a program that will create a language, but it is very difficult (I tried to do this), and it is not conlanging.
You had a typo: there are 5k words in "the recent survey", not 50k words.
There are actually a non-trivial number of language inventors with tens of thousands of words in their lexicons. I know one with I believe over 60k.
I calculated that if you create 100 words per day, it will take 1.3 year to create 50k words.
It's also worth noting that what counts as a "word" can definitely influence these figures -- are different inflectional forms of the same root the same "word"? You can get a lot of words 'for free' if you assume certain answers to these questions and have a language with a rich system of derivation and compounding.
@Sparksbet - True that. I don't know if the surveymonger knew to correct for that or not. Typically, when I've done such surveys in the past, there's always a discussion about "what counts as a word". Agglutinating languages can come up with some pretty long and unconvincing "words".
I think, it depends on
Language type
Language usage
First, language type plays an important role in determining the number of words in that language. i.e., Let us take English as an example. English mostly do not create words from the root, rather it kind of borrows from other languages. Languages like Chinese and Tamil do not borrow words, it creates new words from the existing words. So, if a conlang you are going to create is like English, it might need more words.
Secondly, where and how this conlang is going to be used plays an major role too. For example, take Dovah language, a conlang. This language does not need words related to technology and science as this language is not going to be used in modern timeline, but an ancient timeline. So if the conlang is going to be made for a specific purpose, it is not necessary to add unrelated words.
So, number of words could be even 340 words(Taki Taki (also called Sranan), 340 words. Taki Taki is an English-based Creole spoken by 120,000 in the South American country of Suriname.) to 250,000 words(English) and it has to be noted that Taki Taki is not a full-fledged language and English is one of the most spoken language.
And as a personal advice, before creating a conlang, please refer to the grammar and phonology of other language families other than your mother tongue language family, it would help you to make a unique conlang easily.
Thanks,
thanks for answering my question
@VictorVosMottorthanksMonica You are welcome.
As the other comments have said, this number can vary drastically depending on how in-depth you want to go. To get literally every concept that exists in say, English, you'd need tens of thousands. However, as Zipfian laws have shown, 20% of words receive 80% of the use, and the most common words are used exponentially more than the less common. I tend to strive for 1000 words as a start; the top 207 of which can essentially be a Swadesh list. When going for larger sums of words you can use lexicon generators like Awkwords. This could be used to create phonologies, or even morphologies if you use the formatting correctly.
Information on a minimum useful vocabulary size appears within this answer to a question on Worldbuilding SE.
I don't have a reference but some philologists and linguists have speculated that you could survive (explain who you are, ask for employment and food, etc.) in a foreign land with as few as 500 words. Henry C. Fenn, author of several language texts, felt that a vocabulary of 5000 words was sufficient to support learning new words by context, e.g. by conversing with natives and reading newspapers. In my own experience as a linguist and translator I found 5000 generic words plus about 2000 topical words (those popular for only a few years) sufficient for keeping up with current events. This gives you some idea of the vocabulary size you should be considering.
It depends on the type of conlang you are creating.
I have read, for example, that certain highly polysynthetic languages such as those Eskimo-Aleut, Salishan, and Wakashan stock tend to have only a couple to a few thousand roots, while analytic and fusional languages such as the Austroasiatic Aslian languages, such as Semai and Jahut, have thousands of roots in a category completely lacking in SAE languages, namely "expressives" or ideophones.
Now, obviously roots are not identical to words, but I recall reading in a grammar Inuktitut that there are hundreds of "postbases"—suffixes with often highly salient meaning such as "to help" or "to hunt"—, while likewise the Northwest Coast Wakashan and Salishan languages have hundreds lexical affixes with similarly or even more precise and concrete meanings, such as body parts, common spatial relations, and the like. If I am correct, however, though extremely morphologically complicated, remarkably regular rules apply to these affixes; if your conlang was to adopt say a hundred lexical affixes, it could cut down on the need for separate lexical stems quite significantly.
On the other hand, if you opt for sound symbolism and a fusional and/or isolating route, you probably need at least 3,500-8,000 lexical items; I say 3,500-8,000 because that is the range I regularly run across as between the number of Chinese Characters in common usage and the number of characters the average, college-educated Chinese adult knows. I am aware that Chinese Characters and words or even morphemes do not have a 1-to-1 mapping, but nonetheless I see that as a reasonable range for an isolating language.
This I cannot answer very well, but I can say that I would assume it is significantly lower than a thousand, because so many conlangs are never fully able to be usable or are just naming languages. But for usable conlangs, I would guess around 3,000 or a little more, excluding naming languages and highly developed conlangs.
The number of words in a conlang is up to you- you can start small, then add on layers and layers of vocabulary.
For example- Toki Pona started with just 120 words, but added on a few extra words.
Remember that you can never stop adding words. Whenever you find that you need to add words, just add them.
Thanks for answering my question!
Note though: Toki Pona has been designed specifically to be minimalist, not naturalistic.
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972 | Constructing a language based on existing languages from different families
I wonder how it is possible to construct a language based on the existing languages. My country has Indo-European, Altaic, Semitic, and a small portion of Dravidian and Caucasic languages. I am thinking of a constructed language based on all these languages.
Hello and welcome to our site! This is a very broad question... Could you narrow it down to something more specific?
There should be no problem in doing so -- mix and match features from the various source languages. A precedent for this, for example, is English:
The syntax/grammar is mainly Germanic, including many function words
The vocabulary is mixed (Latin, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Indian, etc.)
I would choose one language as the "base" (in the English case, it's Old English/Anglo-Saxon) and then modify it by replacing/adding some of the vocabulary from the different languages. Also, some grammatical features (morphological endings, etc.) could be mixed up.
If you do it iteratively (i.e., revising the language multiple times, simulating contact between the current version and another influencing language), you can also take into account other types of changes, such as dropping endings that are harder to pronounce or making higher frequent words shorter and less regular.
What you do exactly is up to you, but there shouldn't be any problem from a linguistic point of view.
Possible? Definitely yes!
But I want to give you some more hints on how to do it:
Based on common features: When choosing the sounds for your conlang, prefer those that have broad coverage in your language base, and avoid those that are specific to only one. Do the same for syllable structure; look at what consonants can cluster with each other in a lot of your base languages.
Select common words: Look what words already have crossed the language boundaries and appear as loan words in other languages. These words are hot candidates for inclusion in your conlang. Note also that the process of loaning words tends to result in phonological and morphological simplifications; consider adopting these simplifications as well.
Morphology: Look for common categories expressed by morphology in the base languages and use a simplified system. While Arabic morphology (inflectional and derivational) is elegant and impressive, it does not carry well over to languages with a different structure (no triconsonantal roots). But you still can borrow some elements from it (e.g., prefixes and suffixes). Make sure to create at least some derivational morphology; it will simplify the language and the process of creating the vocab.
Syntax: Check out the basic word order and how to form relative and subordinate clauses in your base language and create a syntax from this information. Also, look for word order phenomena (adjectives before or after the noun, prepositions or postpositions, genitives before or after the noun) and decide how to do them.
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1152 | Strategies for marking boundaries between potentially discontinuous top-level clauses
What are some strategies for making boundaries between top-level clauses obvious?
I think the most straightforward strategy is some kind of collection of sentence-final particles, but I'm curious about others.
I'm particularly interested in features that would enable discontinuous clauses.
I was reading a paper recently about prolific agreement in some Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The noun class that the absolutive argument belongs to can be repeated many times throughout the sentence:
Aˤli-l qːatːa b-ullaj b-ur
Ali(I)-ERG house(III).ABS III-do.PROG III-AUX
Here's an excerpt from Foley's paper Agreement in the Languages of the Caucasus showing a curious fact about this agreement. There are many kinds of words that can exhibit agreement with the absolutive argument, but agreement isn't uniform within a word class.
So far we’ve seen that NEC languages allow verbs of all stripes to
agree — lexical and auxiliary, finite and nonfinite. But agreement is
not limited to verbs. A remarkable property of NEC agreement is its
‘promiscuity’: a wide range of lexical categories can participate in
gender agreement, all controlled by an absolutive clausemate.
...
Yet while agreement in NEC may be promiscuous, it is also spotty. For
any given lexical category that can potentially agree, typically only
a minority of lexical items in that category actually do. For example,
just 32% of Archi verb stems participate in agreement (Chumakina &
Bond 2016:111) ...
A feature like this could be useful for making clause boundaries obvious if the repeated feature changes frequently from clause to clause. I think the absolutive argument is probably pretty variable, but I am not certain.
For instance, suppose we have two sentences. Following the notation of the paper, I'm using ROOT(n) to mean that ROOT has the nth noun class. (I) and (II) don't have any independent expression.
1) 1sg-ERG cat(I)-ABS see-PRES-I
I see the cat.
2) 1sg-ERG mouse(II)-ABS NEG-see-PRES-II
I see the mouse
Combining the sentences in the following way is possible, since it's clear which verb goes with which argument
3) 1sg-ERG cat(I)-ABS mouse(II)-ABS see-PRES-I NEG-see-PRES-II
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?
Should it be ABS(I) and ABS(II)? The way you have it now makes it look like there are different cat and mouse roots but one absolutive case marker.
There is a single absolutive case marker in the example. In Foley's paper, ROOT(I) through ROOT(IV) are used to mark the noun class of a given noun. Example (3) is supposed to contain two interleaved clauses. As far as I know, the Nakh-Daghestanian languages don't actually permit this; it's a hypothetical feature inspired by the prolific agreement that they do have.
Ah, I thought you were proposing there would be two sets of ABS markers to go with the two clauses and two verbs. So is ROOT(I) mean there's an extra marker? But it's not just considered a morpheme?
No, I wasn't proposing two parallel sets of case markers. Although that is a good idea. ROOT(I) is meant just to be an indication that ROOT is in class I.
Is qːatːa really correct or do you mean qaːtaː? I'm surprised to see a word start with a geminate plosive.
@AndrewRay, I no longer have access to the original paper. This Wikipedia page shows that Archi permits some geminate consonants like /qːˤʼ/ and /s:/ at the beginnings of words and prohibits others like /t:/. However, it doesn't show /q:/ as a phoneme at all. Without access to the original paper, I'm not sure what the real word for "house" is.
A remark on example 3: This would be an example of non-context free syntax which is rarely seen in the wild, although not completely unknown of, compare https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/4310/9781 and https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/45741/9781 on [linguistics.se]
What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?
Interesting question! For a start, some languages have ‘verbal classifiers’ (Aikhenvald 2000). These are a set of incorporated nouns or dedicated affixes which agree with a verbal argument, most commonly the S/O argument. Such a system will certainly be mostly or entirely orthogonal to the gender system, so is useful for further disambiguation. Even 5 or so verbal classifiers — a very small number — is enough to give a reasonable number of class/classifier combinations: (I denote the noun classes in uppercase and verbal classifiers in lowercase)
1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I NEG-i-see-PRS-II
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse
By the way, I see no reason why the verb should agree only with the absolutive argument in noun class (cf Bantu), so let’s add some polypersonal agreement for further disambiguation:
1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
Let’s go further. In some languages, alignment is lexically determined by the verb used. Though this usually occurs with agreement affixes, one can imagine a system where there are several possibilities for case-marking of intransitive and transitive verbs, with the verb retaining its transitivity. This adds extra information when two verbs are juxtaposed with their arguments interleaved. In this case, it seems reasonable for a verb like ‘see’ to take absolutive–dative marking (or absolutive–accusative, or nominative–accusative, if you like):
1sg-ABS cat(I,i)-DAT mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
Let’s go further. It is common for converbal constructions to specify whether the verb is same-subject or different-subject with respect to the main verb, or following clause in the case of clause chaining. Of course, the converbal affix only attaches to the verb itself. However, the Australian language Kayardild has a rather odd construction in which an oblique case is suffixed to nearly every single word of a different-subject complement clause (Evans 1995). This gives me enough precedent to postulate a system wherein a same-subject or different-subject affix is added to every word of the relevant clause:
1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
(Incidentally, converbs already allow a certain amount of discontinuity in the main clause: e.g. the man, being a traitor, was tried by the king.)
Let’s go further. Negative concord allows the negative to be marked several different times within the clause (e.g. dialectal I ain’t got no money). It is straightforward to state that e.g. the negative prefix must be applied to both the absolutive argument and the verb:
1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
All these together then give enough leeway to do stuff like:
mouse(II,i)-ABS-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-ABS-DS i-chase-PST-II-I-SS NEG-i-catch-PST-II-I-DS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS, 1sg-ABS-SS rat(II,ii)-DAT-SS cat(I,i)-ABS-DS ii-see-PST-II-SS i-tell-PST-I-1sg-DS, ii-catch-PST-II-I-SS i-get.bored-PST-I rat(II,ii)-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS.
The cat chased a mouse, but didn’t catch it; I saw a rat, and told the cat. The cat caught the rat but got bored.
(Warning: I’m a bit unsure as to whether some of the nouns should take SS or DS marking, but it should be fine as is.)
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1300 | Strategies for dealing with limited/simple phonologies
What problems arise when creating a language with an extremely simple phonology and what are some good strategies for dealing with them?
I'm calling this type of phonology extremely simple for the purposes of this question, but limited or rigid might be a better fit. I'm also not sure whether "phonology" is the right term here or if something like "phonological inventory" would be better. Using "phonemes" or "phonemic inventory" is close, but does not cover phonotactics and suprasegmental features.
An extremely simple phonology is one that does not allow the speaker to pack many bits of information in each syllable/mora/unit of speech time. Prototypical extremely simple phonologies have some or all of the following features:
Few segmental contrasts
Restrictive phonotactics
Limited or no phonemic use of gemination or vowel length
Limited or no phonemic use of tone
Phrased another way, a simple phonology in the sense of the question is what you would get if you started with an inventory like Hawaiian's, Rotokas', or Pirahã's and removed contrastive vowel length or contrastive tone.
Conlangs like Toki Pona have extremely simple phonologies.
What are some common problems that appear in languages with phonologies like this?
What are some strategies for dealing with them?
One example of a possible "problem" might be a large number of homophones.
One major problem is that a small phoneme inventory leads to longer words, as you have fewer short ones available. This kind of relates to the point you already mention, namely homophones: here you simply re-use a word form for multiple meanings.
Words would also sound more alike, even if different. This is one of the main problems I have with Hawai'ian (of course the vocab is mostly unrelated to the Western European languages I know), that words are hard to recognise for a learner, and then it's even harder if individual phonemes are different and completely change the meaning of the word.
This is fine for toki pona, which only has a small inventory of words anyway, but any more extensive language would quickly run into longer words or phrases.
I think Oliver pretty much nailed it on the head. There are a couple of ways around the problems that were mentioned. The first way is to have a highly inflectional language; this would give an explanation for why words are similar, but the words would get longer. Because you would already be expecting to have longer words, this could at least be turned into a feature rather than a detriment. The second way is to allow for less 'traditional', let's say, syllable structures. Think of the English word 'strengths' (/stɹeŋθs/) which has a CCCVCCC structure. Using a much more restrictive (C)V(N) will only make the generations of new words more difficult.
Another problem is the potential overlap of meaning. The word moku in toki pona basically means to Ingest but it also means something that is ingestible (to Eat, to Drink, Food, Beverage). If you don't mind having words having a number of meanings which are generally related, then this shouldn't be a problem. If you want a free couple of words, don't put 'to Be', 'of/from', or (more extremely) 'to Have' into the language. That will save you 3 words right there for different concepts.
The situation you use as an example of "potential overlap of meaning" has nothing to do with any hypothetical "overlap" (any overlap is going to be only in relation to languages that make finer distinctions, and it typically goes both ways too), but everything to do with freer movement between word classes (i.e. zero-derivation).
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to give a complete answer, just adding on.
I've encountered this exact problem with a project I'm working on. If the number of possible sounds per syllable is limited, then limiting syllables is going to be one of the main challenges. Some approaches to limit syllables are:
Assign a separate meaning to every possible syllable that could be pronounced. It's best if the meanings are as distant as possible from each other.
Avoid synonyms, similar to the previous point, where multiple different sounds map to the same meaning.
Allow for things like optional contractions, that shorten the spelling or pronunciation.
Use strict word order rules, as opposed to grammatical particles/prefixes/suffixes, when possible. If a subject is always at the beginning of a sentence, it won't need to be marked as a subject, for example.
When deriving new words by combining existing ones, use very small fragments of root words as opposed to the whole thing. For example, instead of sand + castle --> sandcastle, do sand + castle --> sandle/sastle.
In addition to assigning meaning to syllables, an extreme approach would be to go down to the letter level, approximate meanings for each letter. This can help in the compound word scenario with picking important letters out of a root as opposed to the whole word.
Elision would become the norm.
Speakers of a language with a small inventory and strict CV phonotactics would speak rapidly to compensate for longer words, like speakers of Spanish or Toki Pona. They would elide weaker phonemes, and listeners would identify the dropped sound through their effect on neighboring sounds.
Start with the inventory of Rotokas and simplify it even further. Give it six consonant phonemes p, b~v, t~s, ɾ~d~z, k, ɣ~ʝ and three vowel phonemes a, i, u without contrastive length. You end up with eighteen syllables, some showing anticipatory assimilation before /i/: pa, pi, pu, va, vi, vu, ta, si, tu, da~ra, zi~ri, du~ru, ka, ci, ku, ɣa, ʝi, ɣu. This allows up to 5,800 three-syllable sequences (or more realistically a fraction of that).
In rapid speech, /i/ and /u/ might tend to drop out in syllables before or after a syllable that has /a/. This sort of elision is productive in Japanese and occurred diachronically with the short "yer" vowels in Russian, which had been /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ and were reduced to traces on consonants. Likewise, diphthongs may arise at the surface when /ɣ/ weakens. Slow, careful speech would bring them back, at least until reanalysis a century or two later causes the next sound shift.
To illustrate, populate the lexicon with a few English loans:
/vurara/ "brother", [vɾaɾa]
/titita/ "sister", [sista]
/titaku/ "stack", [stak]
/taki/ "touch", [tac]
/raɣutu/ "route, doubt", [ɾaut]
/vaɣutu/ "vote", [vaut]
/patu/ "pat", [pat]
/pati/ "pass", [pas]
Even though /patu/ and /pati/ have lost their final vowel, the listener can tell them apart because of how vowel /i/ has changed the consonant. Likewise with the final consonants in /titaku/ and /taki/.
It's spoken faster.
For natlangs, there's evidence that the amount of information conveyed per second is consistent across different languages. This is "information" in the sense of Shannon's information theory, measured in bits.
If you have a smaller phonology, then there are fewer possible "signals" (in Shannon's terms), so each signal conveys less information. Thus, you need more signals per second to convey the same amount of information.
The end result is:
Words are longer, as mentioned by others
More phonemes are spoken per second
This is one reason why English-speakers tend to perceive Japanese as being spoken very quickly. Japanese has a much smaller phonemic inventory than English (and a much more restrictive syllable structure), so the number of syllables spoken per second is dramatically higher. I imagine the same would apply to Hawai'ian and various other Polynesian languages, which are also famous for their small phonemic inventories, though I'm not aware of any studies on them specifically.
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1463 | Research into novel language features that are easy to acquire in an L2
Is there any known research on novel language features that are easy to acquire?
I'm most interested in language features that are unexpectedly easy to acquire despite not having an L1 equivalent (so the ease cannot be attributed to transfer).
An international auxiliary language will necessarily include some features that will be novel for some of the people it's intended for.
For example, English has post-nominal relative clauses and Mandarin has prenominal relative clauses and a prospective IAL would have to pick at least one strategy for encoding relative clauses. So some people speaking the language will be using a different word order than they're used to.
I've seen a few papers about second language acquisition regarding syntax and morphology that describe which new constructions are most difficult for specific groups. For example, L1 English speakers learning Mandarin have trouble with the topic comment construction. For example, they will sometimes reject grammatically valid sentences with the object in topic position when asked to distinguish grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
I have also seen papers like this one that tested English speakers' ability to use a randomly-parameterized variant of a constructed language. The findings are interesting. English speakers are good at reproducing the SOV word order in a novel language, and bad at VSO. This is despite the fact that VSO occurs in English in questions.
Just a small note - I found postpositions (as in Hungarian) no brainer at all, despite my L1 being a stock Indoeuropean language. SImilarly, the amount of cases in Hungarian seems daunting, but it is actually rather easy, since these are very regular and just correspond to prepositions. Vowel harmony is trivial as well (the problem is broken harmony for some vowels); head-over-heels inflection of personal pronouns is easy, as well as inverted (relative to IE languages) possessives - everything this comes completely unexpected from the grammar point of view of a typical IE L1 speaker.
Just about any feature could be considered easy to learn if it's relatively simple to explain and it's regular with very few uncommon irregularities. Vowel harmony, as @RadovanGarabík mentioned, is easy if it's something like Finnish: the class of the first vowel determines the class of the rest of the vowels in the word (more or less).
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1235 | Alternatives to independent verbs for encoding desiderative meaning
English uses an independent verb to encode desiderative meaning, namely want. It normally takes an infinitival complement, although I can take a direct object as well if the subject of the infinitival clause is not the same as want's subject.
I want to swim tomorrow.
and
I want you to swim tomorrow.
However, there are some limits to its flexibility in English. It cannot take a dependent clause headed by that.
*I want that I find a yellow pencil soon.
Some languages use a verb similar to want in English, and others use dedicated verb morphology to encode the same meaning. I can't think of any natural languages that use a strategy for encoding the meaning of want (Y) to X that isn't one of those two.
What are some alternative constructions for expressing desiderative meaning, particularly those unattested in natural languages?
*I want that I find a yellow pencil soon.* — in Russian it is possible.
I didn't mean to rule out that possibility in languages other than English. Fixed.
I understood you, I just noted that in Russian it is possible.
Quite a few languages have desiderative as an affix within the verbal system (whether it is analysed as an affix or a full mood being irrelevant here). Japanese and Sanskrit do, for example. It is fairly common (as one would expect) for agglutinating or polysynthetic languages to have one such as Quechua, Finno-Ugric or Turkic languages. It is by no mean universal for these languages: while Hungarian has such a suffix Finnish (and I believe Estonian) lacks it.
Desiderative construction otherwise tend (again not unexpectedly) to be mediated via an auxiliary verb (in Nahuatl, that verb is one of a couple that can be directly integrated into other verbs).
Note that desiderative applies (typically) only to the subject. That is, a form like "I want X to Y" is not a desiderative per se. More accurately, in most language with derivational desiderative affixes, these affixes do not have a "separate" argument structure the way an auxiliary verb an have, so they cannot insert an additional argument. Indeed in Nahuatl, that is exactly what you'll see:
Ticchīhuaznequi (You want to do it)
Ticnequi nicchīhuaz (You want me to do it)
I have not found an easy way to search for information about the three-argument version ("I want X to Y") cross-linguistically, but I'd wager it tends to be formed with some form of Optative or Subjunctive structure.
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1266 | Designing realistic pragmatics, particularly with respect to answering questions
Coming up with new kinds of pragmatics is sort of fun, but it's hard to tell when an idea is incompatible with how people work psychologically.
For instance, what are the limits or universals around asking and answering questions?
I had an idea the other day for a particle that can be used to refuse to answer a question without giving an excuse such as I don't know, but that also isn't rude.
I can think of a couple of non-specific ways of refusing to answer a question in English, but they're all rude or combative.
1. None of your business.
2. Don't ask me that.
3. What a great question.
4. No comment.
The idea behind the question-refusal particle is that it shifts some of the social burden of asking appropriate questions from the asker to the recipient. The other part of the idea is that, in the larger pragmatics/[fake culture] surrounding this language, asking a question that the recipient cannot decline to answer is considered inherently hostile. Therefore, most questions in an ordinary conversation would not come with an expectation of being answered merely considered.
Let's assume with a generic verb-initial language with a few case suffixes for the purposes of this question
y/n.ques INT-see-FIN-REALIS story-ACC
Did you see the movie (lit: story)?
NONRESPONSE
No comment.
Is it unrealistic to design such a language and then insist by fiat that the various ways of explicitly not-answering a question are not rude?
Have a look at Grice's maxims, which describe some of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
@OliverMason, the article itself does mention some differences between different cultures, like Malagasy speakers apparently do not share information as readily as English speakers do. Unfortunately, all of the sources cited are either print books or behind a paywall, so I haven't found more information yet about the Malagasy example.
Asking a question in way such as you propose (considered hostile because the recipient has to answer it somehow) isn't particularly novel or unknown. Consider the classic trap question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Another is "Are you lying now or were you lying then?"
@KeithMorrison I meant that in the con-culture surrounding the language, the norms around asking questions are different. In a casual conversation in American English, not-answering a question is not routine. In order to be polite, you should provide an excuse that's related to the meaning of the question. I meant that, in the con-culture in question, asking a question that you must/should respond to in a non-rude way is impossible since asking a question that you must/should respond to is considered inherently rude, in the same way that generic nonresponses are inherently rude in English.
Consider the following:
"I can't answer that."
"I'd rather not say."
"I don't understand the question."
"It's not that simple."
"It depends."
All of these are examples of non-answers which, as far as I'm concerned, are not rude. So I see no problem with designing a language that just has a non-rude particle for any or all of those situations.
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1359 | Maximizing the distinction between affirmative and negative sentences
What are some strategies for making affirmative and negative sentences as distinct as possible?
The motivation for this question is an annoying pair of words in English: can and can't. They frequently sound very similar in rapid speech.
There's also one attested language, Wyandot, described here, that appears to lack dedicated negative morphemes and instead has an irrealis morpheme and a contrastive morpheme that can convey negation in certain contexts but don't have to.
If you wanted to do the opposite and maximize the contrast between affirmative and negative sentences, what are some strategies for doing so?
To maximize, it seems like at least you'd want to associate negation with:
independent words
conjugation/declension
your loudest phonemes
distinct word order
distinct prosody
You could have a number of independent markers/words as mentioned above.
Turkish has verbs which always negate, and Turkish verbs usually end the thought: e.g., 'değil' for "is not [noun or adjective]"; 'yok' for 'there is not [something].' For negating verbs, it has an infix as part of the conjugation. Reflecting back your point about 'can't,' as a non-native speaker, I can miss this negative infix sometimes. This, even though it is higher on the sonority hierarchy (easier to hear) than the plosive T you point out in 'can't.' (It uses M and a variable vowel.)
So, if you wanted to change a conjugation to express "not," say, instead of a T or even an M, you could try using the loudest sounds in your set (usually wide-mouthed vowels?), ha ha.
You could change word order for negated sentences. We do that for questions. I have noticed. Have you noticed? [rhetorical ;) ]
Also, you could reserve a certain, unusual tone, pitch, stress pattern, etc., for negating, like how it's pretty easy to hear the lilt we put at the end of a question? Not that this is exclusive of the other options, but imagine to say, "You can't have a muffin," you deepen your voice as much as you can and borderline-sing, "You can have a muffin." If people associated deep voice with negation like we associate that rising tone with questions, that'd be pretty hard to miss.
Here are two solutions to this problem that haven't been mentioned yet
suppletive negative forms
a large collection of negative polarity items
One famous example of a suppletive negative form is 有 vs 没(有) in Mandarin. Also, sign languages frequently feature many suppletive negative forms. Sign language existentials are especially prone to having suppletive/irregular negative forms. Suppletive negative forms have the advantage that the corresponding positive word form does not even appear in a negative sentence.
Negative polarity items are words that are only licensed in negative contexts, such as certain uses of yet, even, or anyone in English.
A language could have only a few words that are intrinsically negative, but many more that reliably indicate the presence of negation but don't carry a negative meaning themselves.
The language could also have many positive polarity items too; the idea being that the presence of a positive polarity item reliably indicates the absence of negation ... so by hearing one you know you're in an affirmative sentence.
Looking a bit further down that WALS page you linked, I come across the Noni language, which allows as many as three negative markers in the same sentence:
kɛ́ bɔ́ yà nǔ géé kfun kɛ.
NEG 3p NEG FUT FUT₁ hit NEG
They will not hit (later today).
It seems to me that you can’t get much more distinct than this! (Though there is such a thing as having too much marking: all examples of triple negative marking on WALS, including Noni, have at least one marker optional.)
One strategy that comes immediately into my mind is the use of multiple negative markers like in French ne ... pas, if you miss one of them, you will catch another one. Multiple negation being equivalent to single negation is a frequent feature of natural languages, but it is often optional to use more than one marker of negativity.
Use double negative, such as in Slavic languages (note that the Romance variant is weaker) - this is actually a misnomer, it is a negative concord where in a negative sentence, everything that depends on the negated verb and can be negated has to be negated. This is usually limited to certain pronouns and adverbs, though.
For example, Slovak for nobody ever helped anyone would be
nikto nikdy nikomu nepomohol
nobody never nobody-DAT help-PAST-3P-NEG
It helps most of those negated pronouns and adverbs (and verbs) begin with ne- or ni-.
If you want to go extreme, you could use different roots for negative and positive verbs.
I don't know if this is done in any natural language, but it wouldn't be too strange if you consider how Engish treats adjectives: 'more large' is typically expressed by 'larger', while 'less large' is expressed by 'smaller'. Many, if not most, common adjectives have antonyms with completely different roots! You can of course also have a negative affix (circumfix and/or transfix for maximal contrast!) to use with verbs without a proper "verb antonym", much like un- and non- are used to form English antonyms, even ad hoc ones like "non-blue" or "unpunishable".
Eglish has a few pairs like "end"/"continue", "sink"/"float" etc, but you could easily imagine there being antonyms for nearly any verb. This would drastically reduce the need for negations, and a speaker of such a language might find English use of negations for verbs as silly as we'd find "The non-ugly car is rather un-cheap, and too non-small to fit in my non-unlimited yard".
This can of course be combined with other mechanisms, but I think it goes a long way by itself as well.
For that matter, "more" and "less" themselves are examples of this principle
This can be accomplished in English, although it's usually looked down upon by grammarians as low class speech:
I ain't done nothing to noone / I didn't do nothing to nobody.
Although some people might feel smug pointing out that double negative theoretically cancels itself, in practical terms, if someone heard that sentence there ain't no way they'd confuse it for anything other than the speaker being very emphatic in saying "no". As I just did, when I used "ain't no way" instead of the more "proper" "isn't a way" or something similar.
So for your conlang, simply load it down with multiple negative terms or forms as it reduces the possibility of confusion of intent. To use my example again:
I didn't do something to anyone: single negative term.
Miss the contraction on did (or miss the word not if you didn't contract) and the sentence reverses in meaning.
I ain't done something to anyone: single negative term
Now the negative term is very distinct from the positive, lessening the possibility of confusion.
I ain't done nothing to anyone: two negative terms.
Harder now to extract a positive statement from that (aside from the aforementioned snooty-nosed linguistic logisticians).
I ain't done nothing to noone: three negative terms.
Again, the grammarians may have a seizure seeing that sentence, but there is no way to mistake the intent of what is being stated.
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1528 | How to Indicate Idea Flow
Are there any other schemes to indicate the flow of words/thoughts in writing? (Outside of what I have researched.)
I am specifically asking about how languages present complete grammatical statements and controlling which statements a reader is to comprehend first. Were I not looking for other solutions, I would ask 'how do you order sentences to create paragraphs?', but this assumes structures like sentences and paragraphs. It seems most writing systems indicate the flow of thoughts and ideas by have a general rule, like always reading "from left to right, top to bottom" (Indo-European), "from bottom to top, left to right" (Japanese), or "along the line" (Ogham).
If you are curious, this constructed language is built around the idea of sentence diagramming. Add to regular diagramming the option to branch new diagrams off of words already in your diagram, and you can chain these to express paragraphs as networks of connecting ideas. (So "I caught a fish this morning", "The fish costs 50 shells", "It will be delicious", and "The fish was blue" all come together around the symbol for "fish".)
The problem then comes with ordering ideas with no obvious relations. (Ex: "The king likes dancing. A camel spat." Vs "A camel spat. The king likes dancing.") With how things currently are in this conlang, the writer has no control over which order the reader interprets grammatically complete statements. What are approaches to ordering thoughts/grammatically complete statements?
All writing systems I know of are fundamentally linear, because speech is fundamentally linear (in time). Is that what you mean by "ordering" the ideas?
@Draconis: I fact, we have non-linear elements in our writing system as well, such as bulleted lists or tables.
@jk-ReinstateMonica -- I think it could be argued that bullet lists and tables are sort of a swamp in the flow of the river. The narrow linear stream kind of widens out in a slow flow as you're presented with data that may or may not be relevant before narrowing again and moving on with the thought.
@Draconis edited. Ordering the ideas is how you present complete grammatical statements. This is writing organization one step above sentences. You likely read (assuming you decided to interpret this as english and read things entirely) the first sentence first (Ordering...) then moved on to the next (This...) as opposed to jumping to the third (You...) before reading anything else. Do any languages indicate which statements come first besides some general rule?
@elemtilas To carry this metaphor further, this conlang currently is great at making stagnant swamps and needs something to provide a little current, even when that leads to another swamp.
On Swamps and Morasses
There are a couple of schemes that come to mind immediately that might provide some grist for the mill, if not a full English breakfast.
First, of course, is the one we already use! You assume the existence of sentences and paragraphs already, but I think we should quickly look at them for efficiency sake. We generally learn to write a text, like an essay or a thesis, beginning with the thesis statement, the sort of summation of the whole problem the essay addresses. This is considered to be the statement a reader is to comprehend first. Next down from the entire essay in hierarchy is the paragraph. Likewise, we're taught to begin each one with the main sentence, that one that introduces the main idea to be discussed or revealed in that paragraph. Lastly in the hierarchy are sentences themselves. Interestingly, we don't order sentences "logically" but rather grammatically. Even though one might write a dissertation in Latin and put the thesis statement first, the sentence itself might not actually get to the point until you get to the verb way down at the end.
This scheme is both Linear in the spatio-temporal sense and Top Down in the hierarchical sense.
Secondly, we could consider extending this basic scheme by standardising and increasing the power of punctuation and section markings. Many technical documents do this by noting every paragraph with what amounts to a unique serial number. Often in historical grammars we find references to things like P4a.2.N3 which denotes paragraph four-A (a subset of lesser importance than para 4 itself), section 2, note 3. All in all , a very low importance reference as it's relegated to a foot or end note.
We have lots of interesting, unusual and unused punctuation marks that could be regularised, standardised and ammended to fulfil several key roles from marking importance to speculation or editorialisation. We have things like interrobangs and exclamation commas and the like; some languages have sectional punctuation. All of these could be incorporated into the existing scheme relatively easily.
Thirdly, we should take a look at other systems entirely different. First, let's take a look at music and in specific the conductor's score. Unlike an individual musician, the conductor has access to all the parts that are playing at any moment in the piece of music. Very much like what you're looking for, the conductor needs to be aware at any moment of "what is to be comprehended first" and "how does the whole text flow". Although music itself is linear, and the most important theme or idea isn't necessarily the first thing you hear!, the reader of the score needs to comprehend all the different sections, moving parts, thematic ideas and when they all occur.
As you look in the images in the link, the conductor has marked up the "text" of the music by coordinating various divisions by colour, notes when various themes, motifs and entrances occur and the like.
Even in an individual musician's score or in a piano work, you'll find plenty of "flow" markings: dynamic changes, pedal settings, phrasal markings, accentuation types as well as stylistic & tempo markings.
Some types of music rely heavily on flow marking, for example the genre of unmeasured music. Melodic and harmonic flow are indicated by the composer through the use of sweeping and flowing lines, but the interpretation and execution of the flow is the work of the player.
Another system to look at is hypertext. We've all used it when we hover over highlighted key words and clicked on links to supporting data. And we've all wondered why the composer chose to link two things together that don't make sense just because the other word is spelled the same.
This system allows the writer to make use of the linear nature of reading to ensure that more important topics are marked and read first, but also allows freedom to move between sections and also to dive deeper into a topic through the system of links and hovertext.
Wiktionary puts this to good use by ordering the Important Stuff on the main article page, while linking to supporting data, historical changes, usage quotations, and hiding grammatical apparatus and the like in spoilers.
Take at-baill for instance, an Old Irish verb meaning to throw. The key points and flow are handled here on this primary page with its sections delineated (word, etymology, pronunciation, parts of speech, declension/conjugation, descendants, etc. Clicking on the spoiler bar opens up a whole new view into the agony of grammar. Especially for anyone who thinks Greek verbs are truculent.
The links in all the sections lead one down rabbit holes of time and space and history into other languages, other peoples' perceptions, related forms, semantic drift and all kinds of other interesting inquiries that don't have anything at all to do with the basic thesis you started out with!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.899954 | 2022-02-16T18:55:44 | {
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